Madness Visible: A Memoir of a War - Hardcover

'Janine di Giovanni has described war in a way that almost makes me think it never needs to be described again. If you don't want to know what it's really like, don't pick up this book.' Sebastian Junger 'Janine di Giovanni tells us what it was really like on the frontline -- the squalor, the terror, the barbarity, and the randomness of death. But there was also comradeship, hope, glory and, occasionally, the triumph of the human spirit.' Philip Knightley 'Janine di Giovanni is superb - an extraordinarily brave war correspondent and a wonderful writer.' William Shawcross 'Modern war has become ever more Satanic, and never more so than in the Balkans in the 1990s. Janine di Giovanni is our Virgil, guiding us through the circles of that man-made hell: Sarajevo, Kosovo, Pristina. Her depictions of the fighting recall the best correspondence to come out of the Spanish Civil War...If you read no other book about the Balkan wars, read this one.' Philip Caputo

Award-winning journalist Janine di Giovanni spent much of the 1990s observing the cycles of Balkan violence and vengeance from inside the cities and villages, from refugee camps, makeshift hospitals, and the homes of citizens under siege. Now, she paints an indelible portrait of the war through the staggering experiences of the people who suffered it. It was a conflict that raised challenging questions: What causes neighbours whose families have lived peacefully side by side for centuries to turn with mindless brutality against one another? How do we measure the difference between bravery and cowardice in a conflict so morally ill-defined? What becomes of survivors when the fabric of an age-old community is permanently destroyed? Searching for the answers, di Giovanni brings the human face of war into piercing focus: children dying from lack of medicine, soldiers numbed by and inured to the atrocities they committed; women driven to despair and madness by their experiences in paramilitary rape camps. Acutely perceptive, unflinching, powerfully written - "Madness Visible" will join the work of John Reed, Martha Gelhorn, Michael Herr and Ryszard Kapuscinski as a classic of its time.