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Summary

A “beautiful and disturbing” account of the Bosnian conflict by a war correspondent grappling with addiction and a family legacy of military heroism (The Wall Street Journal).   In an earlier era, Anthony Loyd imagines, he would have fought fascism in Spain. Instead, the twenty-six-year-old scion of a distinguished military family left England in 1993 to experience the conflict in Bosnia as a reporter. While he found his time serving in the British army during the Gulf War disappointingly uneventful, Loyd would spend the next three years documenting some of the most callous and chaotic fighting to ever occur on European soil.   Plunged into the midst of the struggle among the Serbs, Croatians, and Bosnian Muslims, Loyd saw humanity at its extremes, witnessing tragedy daily in city streets and mountain villages. Shocking yet ultimately redemptive, Loyd’s memoir is an uncompromising feat of on-the-ground reportage. But Loyd’s personal war didn’t end when he emerged from the trenches. Hooked to the adrenaline of armed combat, he returned home to continue his own longstanding battle against drug addiction.   “Battlefield reportage does not get more up close, gruesome, and personal. . . . The fear and confusion of battle are so vivid that in places, they rise like acrid smoke from the page.” —The New York Times   “This is pure war reporting, free from the usual journalistic constraints that often give a false significance to suffering.” —Salon.com   “First-rate war correspondence . . . [in] the great tradition of Hemingway, Caputo, and Michael Herr.” —The Boston Globe

• Biography & Memoirs
• Humanities & Social Sciences
• Essay