Author: Atka ReidPublisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408827751
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 354
Book Description
A moving and compelling true story about two sisters fighting for survival in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war
Author: Barry Rex PetersenSarajevo Marlboro
Author: Miljenko JergovicPublisher: Archipelago
ISBN: 1935744739
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 217
Book Description
One of the 25 Books That Inspired the World (1989–2014), World Literature Today A remarkable and bracing collection of “classic anti-war writing” from a Croatian writer whose piercing prose recalls Kurt Vonnegut and Aleksander Hemon (Richard Flanagan, Booker Prize–winning author) Miljenko Jergović’s remarkable debut collection of stories, Sarajevo Marlboro, earned him wide acclaim throughout Europe. In “melancholy, dreamlike” prose, the stories in Sarajevo Marlboro “recall Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, but Jergovic’s book is the strongest of the three” (Maud Newton). Croatian by birth, Jergović spent his childhood in Sarajevo and chose to remain there throughout most of the war. These stories are distinctly of the material world, and they are shaped by Jergović’s deeply personal vision, subterranean humor, and a razor-sharp understanding of the fate of the city’s young Muslims, Croats, and Serbs—the minute details of their interior lives in the foreground, the killing zone in the background.
The Cellist of Sarajevo
Author: Steven GallowayPublisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307371654
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 274
Book Description
This brilliant novel with universal resonance tells the story of three people trying to survive in a city rife with the extreme fear of desperate times, and of the sorrowing cellist who plays undaunted in their midst. One day a shell lands in a bread line and kills twenty-two people as the cellist watches from a window in his flat. He vows to sit in the hollow where the mortar fell and play Albinoni’s Adagio once a day for each of the twenty-two victims. The Adagio had been re-created from a fragment after the only extant score was firebombed in the Dresden Music Library, but the fact that it had been rebuilt by a different composer into something new and worthwhile gives the cellist hope. Meanwhile, Kenan steels himself for his weekly walk through the dangerous streets to collect water for his family on the other side of town, and Dragan, a man Kenan doesn’t know, tries to make his way towards the source of the free meal he knows is waiting. Both men are almost paralyzed with fear, uncertain when the next shot will land on the bridges or streets they must cross, unwilling to talk to their old friends of what life was once like before divisions were unleashed on their city. Then there is “Arrow,” the pseudonymous name of a gifted female sniper, who is asked to protect the cellist from a hidden shooter who is out to kill him as he plays his memorial to the victims. In this beautiful and unforgettable novel, Steven Galloway has taken an extraordinary, imaginative leap to create a story that speaks powerfully to the dignity and generosity of the human spirit under extraordinary duress.
Kin
Author: Miljenko JergovicPublisher: Archipelago
ISBN: 1939810523
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 929
Book Description
Kin is a dazzling family epic from one of Croatia's most prized writers. In this sprawling narrative which spans the entire twentieth century, Miljenko Jergović peers into the dusty corners of his family's past, illuminating them with a tender, poetic precision. Ordinary, forgotten objects - a grandfather's beekeeping journals, a rusty benzene lighter, an army issued raincoat - become the lenses through which Jergović investigates the joys and sorrows of a family living through a century of war. The work is ultimately an ode to Yugoslavia - Jergović sees his country through the devastation of the First World War, the Second, the Cold, then the Bosnian war of the 90s; through its changing street names and borders, shifting seasons, through its social rituals at graveyards, operas, weddings, markets - rendering it all in loving, vivid detail. A portrait of an era.
Author: Edward SerottaThe Tiger's Wife
Author: Téa ObrehtPublisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679604367
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 354
Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • The instant classic debut novel from the author of Inland and The Morningside, hailed as “a thrilling beginning to what will certainly be a great literary career” (Elle) “Spectacular . . . [Téa Obreht] spins a tale of such marvel and magic in a literary voice so enchanting that the mesmerized reader wants her never to stop.”—Entertainment Weekly “Not since Zadie Smith has a young writer arrived with such power and grace.”—Time ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times; Entertainment Weekly; The Christian Science Monitor; The Kansas City Star; Library Journal In a Balkan country mending from war, Natalia, a young doctor, is compelled to unravel the mysterious circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. Searching for clues, she turns to his worn copy of The Jungle Book and the stories he told her of his encounters over the years with “the deathless man.” But most extraordinary of all is the story her grandfather never told her—the legend of the tiger’s wife. Weaving a brilliant latticework of family legend, loss, and love, Téa Obreht, hailed by Colum McCann as “the most thrilling literary discovery in years,” has spun a timeless novel that will establish her as one of the most vibrant, original authors of her generation. ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Wall Street Journal, O: The Oprah Magazine, The Economist, Vogue, Slate, Chicago Tribune, The Seattle Times, Dayton Daily News, Publishers Weekly, Alan Cheuse, NPR’s All Things Considered
Goodbye Piccadilly
Author: Cynthia Harrod-EaglesPublisher:
ISBN: 9780750542593
Category : Families
Languages : en
Pages : 480
Book Description
In 1914, Britain faces a new kind of war. For Edward and Beatrice Hunter, their children, servants and neighbours, life will never be the same again. For David, the eldest, war means a chance to do something noble; but enlisting will break his mother¿s heart. His sister Diana, nineteen and beautiful longs for marriage. She has her heart set on Charles Wroughton, son of Earl Wroughton, but Charles will never be allowed to marry a banker¿s daughter. Below stairs, Cook and Ada, the head housemaid, grow more terrified of German invasion with every newspaper atrocity story they read.
Burning the Books
Author: Richard OvendenPublisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674241207
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Book Description
The director of the famed Bodleian Libraries at Oxford narrates the global history of the willful destruction—and surprising survival—of recorded knowledge over the past three millennia. Libraries and archives have been attacked since ancient times but have been especially threatened in the modern era. Today the knowledge they safeguard faces purposeful destruction and willful neglect; deprived of funding, libraries are fighting for their very existence. Burning the Books recounts the history that brought us to this point. Richard Ovenden describes the deliberate destruction of knowledge held in libraries and archives from ancient Alexandria to contemporary Sarajevo, from smashed Assyrian tablets in Iraq to the destroyed immigration documents of the UK Windrush generation. He examines both the motivations for these acts—political, religious, and cultural—and the broader themes that shape this history. He also looks at attempts to prevent and mitigate attacks on knowledge, exploring the efforts of librarians and archivists to preserve information, often risking their own lives in the process. More than simply repositories for knowledge, libraries and archives inspire and inform citizens. In preserving notions of statehood recorded in such historical documents as the Declaration of Independence, libraries support the state itself. By preserving records of citizenship and records of the rights of citizens as enshrined in legal documents such as the Magna Carta and the decisions of the US Supreme Court, they support the rule of law. In Burning the Books, Ovenden takes a polemical stance on the social and political importance of the conservation and protection of knowledge, challenging governments in particular, but also society as a whole, to improve public policy and funding for these essential institutions.
To End a War
Author: Richard HolbrookePublisher: Modern Library
ISBN: 0375753605
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 457
Book Description
When President Clinton sent Richard Holbrooke to Bosnia as America's chief negotiator in late 1995, he took a gamble that would eventually redefine his presidency. But there was no saying then, at the height of the war, that Holbrooke's mission would succeed. The odds were strongly against it. As passionate as he was controversial, Holbrooke believed that the only way to bring peace to the Balkans was through a complex blend of American leadership, aggressive and creative diplomacy, and a willingness to use force, if necessary, in the cause for peace. This was not a universally popular view. Resistance was fierce within the United Nations and the chronically divided Contact Group, and in Washington, where many argued that the United States should not get more deeply involved. This book is Holbrooke's gripping inside account of his mission, of the decisive months when, belatedly and reluctantly but ultimately decisively, the United States reasserted its moral authority and leadership and ended Europe's worst war in over half a century. To End a War reveals many important new details of how America made this historic decision. What George F. Kennan has called Holbrooke's "heroic efforts" were shaped by the enormous tragedy with which the mission began, when three of his four team members were killed during their first attempt to reach Sarajevo. In Belgrade, Sarajevo, Zagreb, Paris, Athens, and Ankara, and throughout the dramatic roller-coaster ride at Dayton, he tirelessly imposed, cajoled, and threatened in the quest to stop the killing and forge a peace agreement. Holbrooke's portraits of the key actors, from officials in the White House and the Élysée Palace to the leaders in the Balkans, are sharp and unforgiving. His explanation of how the United States was finally forced to intervene breaks important new ground, as does his discussion of the near disaster in the early period of the implementation of the Dayton agreement. To End a War is a brilliant portrayal of high-wire, high-stakes diplomacy in one of the toughest negotiations of modern times. A classic account of the uses and misuses of American power, its lessons go far beyond the boundaries of the Balkans and provide a powerful argument for continued American leadership in the modern world.
