The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War - Slavenka Drakulić

Drakulic has produced yet another remarkable book. Her collection of 18 essays, named for the train between Vienna and Rijeka, moves from the comfortable distance of Cambridge's Harvard Club through the consequences of war for former Yugoslavia. As in How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed ( LJ 3/15/92; ``Best Books of 1992,'' LJ 1/93), Drakulic offers the personal account of a keen observer unsullied by nationalism. Indeed, her humanism permits both judgment of events in Croatia and the metaphor of this war's graphic horror. We still wonder how peaceful neighbors become capable of brutal murder, a process that is at once a ``return to the past'' and the experience of a society denied a ``proper chance'' to transform itself from ``oppressed peoples . . . to citizens.'' It is also a society which lacked the ``political underground,'' that took power elsewhere in Eastern Europe. This short, powerful book is recommended for all libraries. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/93.-- Zachary T. Irwin, Pennsylvania State Univ.-Erie (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.