Lovers and Madmen: A True Story of Passion, Politics and Air Piracy

Rating:
Summary: Captivating True Story About Love and Croatian Politics
Review: Julie Busic's Lovers and Madmen is a fascinating and inspiring story about love - a woman's love for a man and for a nation.

In 1976, four Croatian dissidents and an American woman hijacked a plane in a last-ditch effort to expose the oppression of Croatians within Yugoslavia and the political assassinations of Croatians throughout the world. How did a young American woman become so impassioned about a people for whom she ultimately sacrificed her own freedom and true love? This compelling question guides the reader through the narrative, leading to an intimate discovery of Julie's courage, compassion and spirit and an exploration of one's own heart.

As she shares the details of her life with husband Taik and recounts the events that culminated in the fateful hijacking, Julie tells a riveting and engrossing tale. There is romance and adventure, comedy and laughs (Julie's encounters with some peculiar Croatian ways are hilarious), suspense and tragedy.

Lovers and Madmen is essentially about the passions that drive lovers and madmen...the intersection of love and politics and how it shaped one woman's life.

Rating:
Summary: Fate, Love and Commitment
Review: Scene: 1976. French sharpshooters surround an American aircraft parked on the tarmac of an airport outside Paris, while inside a blonde, pretty American girl - an educated, nice girl anybody would be pleased to have for a daughter - struggles to make things as comfortable as possible for the hijacked American passengers. Kind of movie-of-the-week stuff. Except ... she's not a flight attendant. She's one of the hijackers.

This dissonance between who Julienne Eden Busic is and what she appears to be, indeed what she was growing up in a small Oregon town, forms the essence of her unusual and illuminating memoir, Lovers and Madmen: A True Story of Passion, Politics and Air Piracy.

In language that is luminous, thoughtful, original and flayingly honest, Busic describes her transition from apolitical schoolgirl to revolutionary and the catalytic agent: love. But in Busic's rendering, the line between love and fate blur.

She meets exiled Croatian dissident Zvonko "Taik" Busic on a street corner in Vienna, though "meet" is perhaps the wrong term -- he seems to be stalking her. Yet he's late for their first date, careless about time. In fact, without in any way being violent or overbearing, he moves early to assert dominance in their relationship. "In truth ... I am too fond," Juliet says to Romeo after agreeing to marry him after only one meeting. "And therefore thou mayst think my 'havior light: But trust me, gentleman, I'll prove more true than those that have more cunning to be strange." Julie and Taik's romance has that quality, if not so much the passionate declarations of Shakespeare's famous lovers, still the sense of the hand of fate trailing downward, touching one then the other, almost as if at random, linking them forever together, no matter how high the cost.

And the cost is very, very high. Julie first does six months in a squalid Yugoslav prison for smuggling and distributing revolutionary leaflets inside that then-Communist nation. When she is finally freed, upon bathing, she leaves a scum of dirt in the bathtub, so filthy is she from her ordeal. Taik neither congratulates her on her stamina nor thanks her. It seems that, so ingrained in him is the idea that one suffers for one's convictions that he doesn't even acknowledge her sufferings for his.

And his conviction is that people should be allowed to express their own culture in their own country, to be free men on the land on which they were born. Busic paints him as dark, foreign, next to her open, American blondness. But such convictions as his are quintessentially American. Which is why, when the idea of a non-violent hijacking occurs, it is upon American soil that it is hatched and the plan is to educate Americans, who have been kept largely in the dark by U.S. media, of the plight of the Croatians, this annexed people caught up in the country-carving that occurred in the wake of World War I.

The plan seems naive in retrospect. Post September 11th, chillingly so. Yet, in an odd way, still "necessary" from the revolutionary perspective. Even after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the recent Balkan bloodshed, the emergence of Croatia as an independent nation, Americans still aren't quite sure what it's all about, whose side to be on, can't understand such bloody, nationalist feuds.

Perhaps, in addition to her fateful love for Taik, this sometimes irritatingly innocent American naivete is what propelled the author toward her revolutionary destiny. To many world citizens, America must seem like a fat and innocent child, the majority of its citizens largely unaware of the sufferings and political machinations affecting the daily life of most other residents of this planet. Once made aware, however, some Americans chafe at their confinement in the playpen, feeling, with George Bernard Shaw, a longing for "the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap, the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy."

Julie Busic, with her Master's degree in German and linguistics, served thirteen years in a federal prison for her role in the hijacking. Taik, gray-haired now but still buttressed by his convictions, the support of Croatian nationalists who consider him a hero, and, not incidentally at all, the remarkable love of his wife, Julie, remains imprisoned in a country, the United States, still reeling in shock that political struggle can touch its residents so personally.

Lovers and Madmen is a travelogue of the underground revolutionary life. Julie and Taik move from city to city, sometimes ushered out by security police, sometimes ducking under windows in fear of bullets. They drink wine in Paris with a gentle, artistic dissident who would later be assassinated, scrub floors in dingy Cleveland apartments to scrape together a living on the run, collaborate with Irish revolutionaries. And throughout, they endeavor, together, to discover, what is this thing that has touched and joined them: this fateful love that endures, across oceans, cross culture, behind bars.

Rating:
Summary: Real Life Revolutionary Heroes
Review: Sometimes the seeds of revolution are nurtured in backrooms, sometimes in the beds of lovers. This is the autobiographical account of a young American woman's involvement in the Croatian underground in the 1970s. It chronicles her internal machinations as well as her role in the movement to free Croatia from the totalitarian grip of communist Yugoslavia. At first, her involvement is for love of her Croatian boyfriend (Zvonko), then from a deep commitment to the liberation of Croatia. It began with a little favor--the dumping of pro-Croatian leaflets from a tower in the center of Zagreb which resulted in her arrest and brief imprisonment in Yugoslavia. The couple's subsequent activities, and flight from the Yugoslavian secret police, are then traced through Austria, Yugoslavia, Germany, France, Ireland, and the United States, ending with the coup de grace of an airliner hijacking as a political statement in New York City in 1976. Her story reminds the reader that youthful idealism, naivete, and bravado are the best fuel for the fires of unfolding revolutions and insurrections. The author relates her story with superb humor, unflinching honesty, and some wonderfully written prose; especially memorable is the account of her incarceration in Yugoslavia. Her account illustrates well the paradox of one country's criminal becoming another nation's folk hero. Julie Busic served thirteen years of a life sentence for her role in the hijacking. Her husband, Zvonko (Taik) Busic, has just begun the 25th year of his sentence.

Rating:
Summary: Real Life Revolutionary Heroes
Review: Sometimes the seeds of revolution are nurtured in backrooms, sometimes in the beds of lovers. This is the autobiographical account of a young American woman's involvement in the Croatian underground in the 1970s. It chronicles her internal machinations as well as her role in the movement to free Croatia from the totalitarian grip of communist Yugoslavia. At first, her involvement is for love of her Croatian boyfriend (Zvonko), then from a deep commitment to the liberation of Croatia. It began with a little favor--the dumping of pro-Croatian leaflets from a tower in the center of Zagreb which resulted in her arrest and brief imprisonment in Yugoslavia. The couple's subsequent activities, and flight from the Yugoslavian secret police, are then traced through Austria, Yugoslavia, Germany, France, Ireland, and the United States, ending with the coup de grace of an airliner hijacking as a political statement in New York City in 1976. Her story reminds the reader that youthful idealism, naivete, and bravado are the best fuel for the fires of unfolding revolutions and insurrections. The author relates her story with superb humor, unflinching honesty, and some wonderfully written prose; especially memorable is the account of her incarceration in Yugoslavia. Her account illustrates well the paradox of one country's criminal becoming another nation's folk hero. Julie Busic served thirteen years of a life sentence for her role in the hijacking. Her husband, Zvonko (Taik) Busic, has just begun the 25th year of his sentence.

Rating:
Summary: Passion, Love and Intrigue
Review: With the subtlety of an impressionist brush, a picture quickly emerges of love, intrigue, and a passion for the people of Croatia. Lovers and Mad Men takes the reader on a detailed tour into the inner workings of the Croatian Nationalist Movement as it gains power as a political force. The reader is whisked through the back streets of world capitals and into dark alleys for clandestine meetings with the leaders of terrorist groups. Keeping just steps ahead of the dreaded Yugoslav secret police, you go with the Busics to meetings in smoky cafes and bars. You can almost taste the Slivovitz. Busic then keeps the reader by the hand as she details the inner workings and hard life of a committed member of a subversive group. She opens her emotional being for all to see as her passion for her lover, Taik, and the Croatian people grows. It may read, at times, like an action packed fictional work of Ian Fleming, but it is all true, as experienced by a regular girl from Portland Oregon. Take this one with you on that long plane flight. With this book, you won't mind economy class.

Rating:
Summary: Passion, Love and Intrigue
Review: With the subtlety of an impressionist brush, a picture quickly emerges of love, intrigue, and a passion for the people of Croatia. Lovers and Mad Men takes the reader on a detailed tour into the inner workings of the Croatian Nationalist Movement as it gains power as a political force. The reader is whisked through the back streets of world capitals and into dark alleys for clandestine meetings with the leaders of terrorist groups. Keeping just steps ahead of the dreaded Yugoslav secret police, you go with the Busics to meetings in smoky cafes and bars. You can almost taste the Slivovitz. Busic then keeps the reader by the hand as she details the inner workings and hard life of a committed member of a subversive group. She opens her emotional being for all to see as her passion for her lover, Taik, and the Croatian people grows. It may read, at times, like an action packed fictional work of Ian Fleming, but it is all true, as experienced by a regular girl from Portland Oregon. Take this one with you on that long plane flight. With this book, you won't mind economy class.