{"product_id":"madness-visible-isbn-9780375724558","title":"Madness Visible","description":"As a senior foreign correspondent for \u003ci\u003eThe Times\u003c\/i\u003e of London, Janine di Giovanni was a firsthand witness to the brutal and protracted break-up of Yugoslavia. With unflinching sensitivity, \u003cb\u003eMadness Visible\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003efollows the arc of the wars in the Balkans through the experience of those caught up in them: soldiers numbed by the atrocities they commit, women driven to despair by their life in paramilitary rape camps, civilians (di Giovanni among them) caught in bombing raids of uncertain origin, babies murdered in hate-induced rage.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDi Giovanni’s searing memoir examines the turmoil of the Balkans in acute detail, and uncovers the motives of the leaders who created hell on earth; it raises challenging questions about ethnic conflict and the responsibilities of foreign governments in times of mass murder. Perceptive and compelling, this unique work of reportage from the physical and psychological front lines makes the madness of war wholly visible.\"[An] unforgettable account. . . . Vivid, compassionate prose. . . . Few writers can match her evocations of individual suffering in wartime.\" —\u003ci\u003eNewsweek\u003c\/i\u003e (International Edition)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Many journalists have written accounts of the wars of Yugoslav dissolution. \u003cb\u003eMadness Visible\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eis among the best of them. . . . One of Giovanni’s strengths is that if she takes sides it is simply the side of the victim. . . . Succeeds admirably.” –\u003ci\u003eTimes Literary Supplement \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A compelling and meticulous account. . . . The author is at her very best when she writes about the people. . . . When di Giovanni speaks of Sarajevo –and she does speak, her voice poignant, grief admixed with rage and frustration– it is gripping.” –\u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Compelling reportage at its best: grisly and depressing at times, of course, but also revealing.” –\u003ci\u003eThe Economist\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“One of the best books ever written about war.” --\u003ci\u003eThe Arizona Republic\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Moving. . . . Janine di Giovanni is our Virgil, guiding us through the circles of that man-made hell: Sarajevo, Kosovo, Pristina. . . . If you read no other book about the Balkan wars, read this one. \" --Phil Caputo \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“[An] important book. . . . There are few outsiders who better understand what has happened in the Balkans. . . . \u003cb\u003eMadness Visible\u003c\/b\u003e is the story of all wars.” --\u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e (London)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Di Giovanni connects names and battles as well as peoples who have a historic distrust of one another. . . . This is di Giovanni's one war, and she passionately documents its inhumanity.\" --\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Illuminating. . . . [Her] stream-of-consciousness approach . . . imbues the book with its quiet but undeniable emotional power. . . . [Despite the] gloom that pervades each page, these accounts remain compelling because of Di Giovanni’s resolve to grasp each individual’s frail sense of hope and shattered human dignity.” --.\u003ci\u003eSan Antonio Express-News\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Remarkable. . . . A powerful, passionate account, and well worth the waiting for.” --\u003ci\u003eThe Times\u003c\/i\u003e (London)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Janine di Giovanni has described war in a way that almost makes me think it never needs to be described again. . . . More than a book about war, however, this is a book about the human race, in all its anguishing complexity. I can honestly say that I finished this book a wiser, more compassionate person than when I started.\" --Sebastian Junger\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Powerful. . . . Moving. . . . Full of gripping reportage about the horrors of life during wartime.” --\u003ci\u003eNewsday\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The veteran reporter has a keen eye for detail and dialogue [while] . . . delving . . . substantially into the political, historical and ethnic tensions contributing to the 1992-95 war. . . . While di Giovanni looks back, however, she is aware that others do not. . . . \u003cb\u003eMadness Visible\u003c\/b\u003e reminds us of the folly and shame in this neglect.\" --\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Janine di Giovanni is superb--an extraordinarily brave war correspondent and a wonderful writer as well. What a combination!” --William Shawcross \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Excellent. . . . Di Giovanni depicts just how unsatisfactory, even crazy, the 'peace' in Kosovo is. . . . Her descriptive talents are at their best when her eye comes to rest on the plight of civilians. . . . Don't read this book for its analysis of Balkan politics, which you can get elsewhere, but for its very humane portrait of fighters, refugees and victims.\" --\u003ci\u003eThe Daily Telegraph\u003c\/i\u003e (London)\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\"An embedded journalist before the term was invented. . . . [Di Giovanni] provides a haunting record of the continuing war in the Balkans.\" --\u003ci\u003eHarper's Bazaar\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Powerful. . . . The images are unforgettable and di Giovanni writes movingly, with no need for embellishment, about . . . the insanity and irrationality of human behavior. Read this book and you may begin to understand what war looks and feels like, or even smells like.\" --\u003ci\u003eThe Spectator\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Chilling. . . . [Di Giovanni's] courage is matched only by her compassion for her subjects. . . . She is a woman who simply doesn't know the meaning of the word 'can't' and in her profession that's a major asset.\" --\u003ci\u003eThe Evening Standard \u003c\/i\u003e(London)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Should be read . . . for an understanding of the depravity of Balkan wars of ethnic cleansing . . . [and for the] insights [it] offer[s] into the world of war correspondents working at the razor’s edge of their profession.” --\u003ci\u003eColumbia Journalism Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Affecting. . . . Her account reflects both her passionate engagement with the people and her own sense of deep loss in this place.\" --\u003ci\u003eThe Hartford Advocate\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eJanine di Giovanni is a senior foreign correspondent for \u003ci\u003eThe Times\u003c\/i\u003e of London and a contributing editor to \u003ci\u003eVanity Fair\u003c\/i\u003e. She is the recipient of a 2000 National Magazine Award for her reporting from the Balkans, two Amnesty International awards for war reporting from Sierra Leone and Kosovo, and Granada Television's Foreign Correspondent of the Year award for being one of the few reporters to witness the fall of Grozny, Chechnya. She has been the focus of an award-winning documentary about women war correspondents, \u003ci\u003eNo Man's Land\u003c\/i\u003e. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she received an M.F.A. in fiction. She lives in Paris with her husband, the French reporter Bruno Girodon, and their baby son, Luca.Chapter One\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Exactly how much time passes from the moment a man is wounded until he  starts to feel pain?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Sometimes it's a second.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Sometimes it's an hour.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Sometimes it's more than an eternity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Artyom Borovik, The Hidden War\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Albanians Killed as Kosovo Village Is Blown Apart;\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    At Least 60 Civilians Die\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    More than 60 Albanians were killed and scores more badly wounded late  Thursday night when bombs blew apart a village in southwest Kosovo, near  Prizren, Yugoslav officials and journalists at the scene said Friday.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The attack, in Korisa, was said by Yugoslav Government officials to have  been carried out by NATO warplanes. . . . NATO officials in Brussels said  they were investigating the report and were reluctant to comment before  their work was complete. . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    New York Times, May 15, 1999\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    KLA Forward Base Camp  Near Kosare, Kosovo  May 12, 1999\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Much later, I remembered the stillness, the quiet of chaos.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The wet, late spring.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The way time slowed down until each second seemed elastic. The sixty seconds  that it took for four men to lift the youngest soldier, dead, boots still  on, and lay him carefully on the back of a truck bound for the morgue. How  everything surrounding that minute--the tears of the soldiers lifting him,  the way a hand was cupped over a match to light a cigarette, the Kalashnikov  thrown angrily on the ground--stretched into hours.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In the background, the low rumble of noise. It seemed so far away, over the  mountain even, but it was right there. Some soldier crying: \"My two brothers  died. . . . I don't want to die.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Or the way the sky changed. The early-morning breaking light during the  first wave of bombing, deepest blue with the faintest brushing of stars.  Then lighter azure, then premature streaks of pink. The sun finally rising  over the harsh mountains. Then finally light enough so that I could see the  sleeping soldiers next to me, dotting their way down the trench. In the  darkness, I mistook them for tree stumps.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Or the way that the wounded looked when the others carried them into the  trench. The way they did not scream or beg, just submitted. The childlike  surprise on their faces. One minute sleeping quietly, the next, the leg they  can still feel, no longer there.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    One of them was a half-dressed teenager. Face, neck, chest covered in blood,  brighter than the blood dried on his gray sock. The sock was still on his  left foot, but his right foot was gone, as was his right calf, his right  knee. The last bomb blast caught him, surprised, down near the riverbed  twenty minutes before, and he must have been feeling the pain by then. But  he lay silently on a stained stretcher and waited as though he were waiting  for a bus.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    First step of first aid: expose the wound. So they cut away his T-shirt to  see where he'd been hit, and he was there in the wan sunlight, topless,  shivering. Next to him, another boy, skin slashed with hot shrapnel, chest  peppered with wounds that were dotted like measles. The medic, a  twenty-three-year-old architect who lived in Switzerland, moved from body to  body, slapping field dressings over open wounds, injecting morphine, washing  away blood and dirt and mud.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The boy without the leg looked forgotten in the chaos of the morning  bombing. It was too loud in the ditch for anyone to hear him whimpering. He  lay alone, throbbing with pain, and watched those scenes of anger inside  that ditch: of soldiers running from their positions, running away to the  forest. A commander called for them to come back. They continued to run,  cantering like colts.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Ali, the Moroccan commander, shouted, \"The Serbs are two thousand yards  away!\" He told everyone to prepare for a ground assault. \"Every soldier,  grab your arms and ammo, and go, get to the front.\" The soldiers stared at  him blankly. Some moved. Others just stared.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The medic, moving between bodies, touched my arm. \"Help me,\" he said. He  stood over a teenager with acne and an exposed bone in his leg, a cut over  his left eye. The medic held the flesh together and moved the needle through  the skin as if he were mending a button on a shirt. The needle did not  pierce the flesh easily. The medic cursed. He pushed the needle through the  flesh again, harder this time, and the boy underneath him winced.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Nearby was someone else: a body with a mangled leg, deep in shock. We pulled  down his trousers and the medic threw the bloody fatigues in the mud. The  boy looked at him, startled, confused. He's not embarrassed that he's lying  there without trousers; he's dreaming he's back in Pristina in a bar,  because he keeps reaching into the top pocket of his T-shirt and pulling out  a crumpled packet of L\u0026amp;M cigarettes. He put one in his mouth, offered  another to me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I wiped blood, took the cigarette out of his mouth. But he kept offering the  pack. The medic jabbed him with something and looked up over the trench to  see a seventeen-year-old girl soldier called Jacky. She had a blond ponytail  and a small Koran on a leather strap around her neck. Everyone said she was  the mistress of the commander, but she said, in a small, tough voice, that  she was there to fight. She ran with a box of ammunition and a friend with  short spiked hair and a Walkman tuned to hip-hop. The friend left the music  on even during the shelling.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The medic had been in the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) for several months  now. His time as a soldier had made him cynical, suspicious of NATO's  intervention, of the sudden interest of the West. \"I believe only in the  KLA,\" he said. \"I believe we will get what is best for our country.\" He had  steely round glasses. As he looked up at the sky, there was another flash of  light, another explosion, and it caught his lenses. \"I don't believe in  NATO.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He rolled the boy with the cigarette onto his side, checked his breathing by  sliding his finger under his nose and putting his head on his chest, and  moved down the trench. He told me to watch the boy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The boy slept, soft hair falling across his forehead, his wounds. The  cigarette pack was left in the mud.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It has been nearly two months since the NATO bombing campaign inside Kosovo  began, a response to a wave of Serbian military and paramilitary attacks on  Kosovar Albanian civilians. Those attacks included assassinations, mass  killing, burning villages. Then the refugees began pouring into neighboring  Albania, Macedonia, and Montenegro. They passed on donkey-pulled carts, in  vehicles, or on foot, slipping on the ice, in the mud, in the snow, carrying  their lives in shopping bags.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In one week alone, between March 31 and April 2, 1999, the United Nations  High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) noted that 230,000 people had fled,  Europe's biggest refugee exodus since the war in Bosnia. At one point, Jamie  Shea, NATO's spokesman, announced that 4,000 ethnic Albanians were leaving  every hour. \"We have to recognize we are on the brink of a major  humanitarian disaster in Kosovo,\" Shea said from his perch in Brussels, \"the  likes of which have not been seen in Europe since the closing stages of  World War II.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Someone took a photograph during those days: a mass of refugees forced to  leave Pristina by train in Macedonia, huddled together like cattle,  thousands stuffed inside ancient railway cars. Some were forced to walk  alongside the tracks. A blind man tapped his cane along the railway  telegraph wires for guidance.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Forward bases, front lines like those at Kosare, sprung up. The Ushtira  Clirimtare e Kosoves (UCK), or KLA, was swelling with soldiers who wanted to  push back the Serbs, liberate their country, and rescue the refugees who  were stranded in the hills. The soldiers I was with in Kosare were trying to  liberate the town of Junik. They had taken our position from Serbs a few  days before, and now we were getting hit, unsure of who was bombing us.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"We don't know who's killing us,\" Ali said, \"NATO or the Serbs.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I was sleeping in Ali's tent, along with other soldiers, most of whom were  in their early twenties. Ali was older and experienced. A devout Muslim, he  prayed five times a day and had come from North Africa to fight for his  Balkan Muslim brothers. He made it clear that he did not like my being  there.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The bombing, he said darkly, was a punishment. \"It's because of last night,\"  he said. The night before was someone's birthday. Everyone sat around a  fire, drinking, smoking, singing. \"Allah is angry. Women. Alcohol.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Because he said he had been a captain in the Moroccan Special Forces, and  because most of the younger soldiers were silent with fear, he wordlessly  began to take control. He moved down the trench carrying a stack of old  helmets, which he threw like footballs to the soldiers. Mine landed in the  mud; it had no strap. He then separated us, fifty meters between each  person. \"Because when more bombs fall, I don't want to lose all of you.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I stayed where I was with the injured boy. I watched Ali moving away, heard  him calling, his voice growing fainter: \"Be prepared for everything,\" he  said. \"Be prepared for anything.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The boy slept. His face was hot, his body did not move. He continued  breathing. But outside, another boy, dark, Arabic, with a beard, pulls down  his trousers. He squats. He's covered in blood and is in too much pain to be  embarrassed. He's got shrapnel wounds all over his leg, his arm. He lifts  one hand. \"Water,\" he says, in English.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I passed him the bottle. He drank from it, collapsed on the ground. The sky  changed. Morning had come. The pink light softened the rocks on the  mountains, the jagged cliffs. The grayness faded, then brightened to blue.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"Oh my God,\" someone said, \"it's a perfect day for bombing.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    At some point later, I looked at my watch. I thought it was late afternoon.  It was only nine o'clock in the morning.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Café Drenica  Durres, Albania  May 3, 1999\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    How did they get here, to this field in Kosovo?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Sometimes, I sat with them outside the tents and listened to their stories.  Why are you here? What made you come? Everyone had a different story, but  most of them, in the early days, before they got to the front line, seemed  so young. When you looked hard at the recruits, and saw fresh haircuts and  spotted skin, you realized they lied about their ages. When you saw them  holding guns, imitating someone they'd seen in the movies, you realized they  had no experience. When you saw them at night, saying prayers or leaning  across their sleeping bags to borrow a match or a Swiss Army knife, or  sitting outside the tent alone, talking about their girlfriends or their  mothers, you knew: this was the first time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When you saw the drawer full of their passports from the United States,  Sweden, England, and read their dates of birth--1979, 1981, 1978--you  realized then they were kids who had read something about war in the  newspaper and, triggered by patriotism or adrenaline, bought a plane ticket.  They paid their own way, found gear from Frank's Army \u0026amp; Navy store in the  Bronx, packed fatigues, red bandannas like Rambo's, maps, and water  canteens. Then a cheap flight to Rome, train to Bari, boat to Durres in  Albania. Then two days on a minibus, north to the war.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But first they stay a few days in southern Albania. Getting acclimated,  sitting in a café drinking coffee, watching the other recruits. In Durres,  there were bandits, thieves, and Albanian mafiosi, all jostling for  position. During Roman times, it was called Dyrrachium, one of the great  cities on the eastern Adriatic. Now there are prefabricated white houses  slouching toward the sea, belonging to wealthier Albanians, and piles of  trash--plastic bottles, tins, toilet paper--by the Roman ruins. There's a  tenth-century Byzantine church, neglected, because there is more important  business going on here; down the road is Vlora, the port city where  high-speed boats loaded with illegal aliens set off for the Italian coast  each night.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Further inland, there's Fier. Fier is spooky and dark. As we drive through  the dusty, wide streets, the locals, sitting in roadside cafés, look up from  their coffee and stare without smiling. In the center of town is a former  chicken farm with wire fencing. Behind it live Kosovar Albanian refugees who  escaped the Serbs. The aid agencies have forgotten they're there. At night,  Mercedes with tinted windows roll up and men in black leather jackets try to  entice the prettiest girls to come out from behind the fence and talk to  them. They tell them they will give them jobs as waitresses in Italy, jobs  as au pairs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"But they get there and there are no jobs as waitresses,\" Anna told me. She  wore tight jeans and a pink T-shirt, was a student of German literature  before the war. She spoke for a few moments and then started to cry. The  blue mascara she had applied that morning in front of the single mirror all  the women shared ran down her face. Her words came out faster. She was  desperate, she said. She felt like she was in prison.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Because of these men who came from Vlora and Durres, aided by locals,  looking for refugee girls, she said, she was afraid to go anywhere without  her father. He stood behind her, dark and quiet, and said he could no longer  protect his daughter from the gangs, and would we take Anna out of Fier? He  said that the day before, they had gone to the village to make a telephone  call. When he left Anna alone to use the bathroom, he returned to find her  surrounded by men.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"Because we're refugees,\" she said, \"we have no rights.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Anna told me she was afraid to go to sleep at night. She said that when she  closed her eyes, she could not forget there was a Mercedes parked at the  gate, and inside the car were men who had guns and more power than she did.  Some of the women in the camp had already gone willingly, but there were  stories that others were taken.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I believed Anna, and I found an Albanian policeman who confirmed the story,  as did a French intelligence officer, who said that the Greek consulate in  Tirana provided the girls with visas. If they did not go to Greece or to  Italy--where one in three prostitutes comes from Albania--they went to Saudi  Arabia or the Gulf States. It is believed that since Albanian independence  in 1992, 10,000 local women have been taken to Italy and 20,000 to Greece.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300887843045,"sku":"NP9780375724558","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375724558.jpg?v=1767732052","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/madness-visible-isbn-9780375724558","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}