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Summary: A face from the other side of the mirror
Review: "I did not know the details but I decided to go there...I felt young and lucky."Few war correspondents of any age have been as devoid of a sense of calling as Anthony Loyd. In 1992 he went to Sarajevo with a diploma in photography as his "cover" and an adolescent's fascination with war as his real motivation. If he went there to find himself, he succeeded. He lost himself as well. A cameraman friend of mine remembers Anthony Loyd in Bosnia as friendly, modest and generous. These qualities might have driven an entirely worthy account of the Yugoslav wars. But it is Loyd's other side, his darkness, that makes this such an extraordinary and essential account. Prostitute the values of home, he writes, and "your wisdom multiplies". He hangs with crims and victims, romantics and murderers. In time his ignorance and cynicism metamorphisises to awareness, to rage, to disillusionment, and ultimately to his own dark clarity. This is a helluva book about war, and of the high price of the knowledge of it.. It looks unflinchingly at atrocity, at notions of courage and idealism, at the instinct to attend wars that are none of your business, and the other instinct of powerful nations to avoid wars that should be their business. It gives a belly-up view not only of the Bosnian conflict in all its varied guises, but of Chechnya as well. Loyd, inevitably, becomes a casualty himself. The sane man's response to such things is to act in an insane way. Heroin does it nicely. Give this man a mug of sljivovica and a pillow for his head. The prices he has paid are his, but he has written a roiling, shrapnel-blasted cracker of a book that renders most everything else in the genre pale: a terrifying, compelling, inverse morality tale. It is indecent that awfulness on such a scale should be such a good read.
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Summary: Incredibly Powerful Narrative Of Modern War
Review: I chose this book with the goal of comprehending the conflict in the Balkans. Loyd is an excellent writer with an eye for detail and a gift to deliver the big picture. After finishing the book, I feel that I have a much better understanding of the events, and I am horrified. Some reviews comment on the lack of pictures (odd indeed for a photo journalist), but I'm personally thankful to have been spared an eyeful of the atrocities, tragedies and pain lobbied back and forth between these factions. More than a journalist, Loyd is a writer and an adventurer, and this is his trip. Don't expect a straight forward history of the Balkans, it comes in doses, the story keeps a general chronological order, but there is temporal incongruence. It didn't bother me in the least. Also, this is Loyd's story. He intersperses accounts of his life in England, his distant father, his heroin habit. If anything, view these as extras. This is a brilliant account of the situation in the Balkans (with a terrifying chapter on Chechnya towards the end) and the author's personal vignettes should be savored and considered as a means to better understand the kind of man who day trips into other people's nightmares.
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Summary: Multicultural Madness
Review: This is tale of war on the ground, as seen by those intimately involved in it. Not for Loyd the usual reportage from a remote news conference given by the "good guys" whose interest is primarily to promote the proper spin to events, fooling the world into believing in the goodness of his side. He goes in harms way, crossing the borders between the good/bad guys and the other good/bad guys, revealing in all its detail the horrors of war. It is a personal adventure, told from a first person point of view, and it is an eloquent, moving piece of journalism at its best. One is reminded of another hero of the profession, Robert Fisk, who tells a similar tale of the war in Lebanon in "Pity the Nation." Both of these books are about what happens when a multicultural nation falls apart into its ethnic pieces, which get unscrambled in a horrific multisided civil war. They show how ordinary people of different ethnicities and religions can live peacefully side by side for many years, with all the predictable compromises and legalities, intermarriages and friendships, then turn in a matter of months into communities at war, destroying everything that had been built up over the preceding decades. Everything inevitably follows a repeating process that is very poorly understood from an objective or scientific point of view. Explanations of the phenomenon abound, usually centered around a bankrupt and distorted variation of good guys vs. bad guys, which unfortunately goes nowhere in arriving at a true understanding of the phenomenon. These explanations and rationalizations are actually a part of the phenomenon, and can hardly be accepted in any meaningful way. What is needed is an underlying theory which can be used in a scientific way to form hypotheses and models, studied by statistical methods, and enable useful predictions and perhaps even preventative measures to be taken. Is it possible to predict the "tipping point" where the transition to communal war occurs? Is it possible to intervene in ways that don't make the problem worse? These questions can only be asked in a meaningful way when men such as Loyd and Fisk have provided the crucial data and observations that others can utilize for a scientific approach to succeed. In the meantime, these tragedies will continue to occur, the political charlatans will continue their spinning, historians will follow the leaders, and the outsiders point their fingers in the trials of the defeated. The real message, though, for Americans and Europeans alike, intent on promoting multicultural dreams through unconstrained immigration of other ethnicities, is to examine the possible outcomes, one of which is a nightmare.
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Summary: My War Gone by, I Miss It So
Review: In Sarajevo, the horrors are specific - such as an old couple blasted away by an anti-aircraft gun. In central Bosnia, the horrors come so fast and furious they tend to blend together: vast dislocations of civilians, haggard correspondents rushing to get to the action without getting killed, the ethnic cleansing of the Croats and Serbs. One incident stands out: a young woman raped by a Croat soldier before her bedridden father, who had recently suffered a stroke and could not walk, talk or feed himself. His daughter's rape is one of the last images he takes from this world. Yet, despite such horrors, when Loyd goes to Chechnya in 1995 to witness the Chechens rebellion against the Russians. Loyd has a matter-of-fact writing style which augments rather than softens the carnage he describes. At the same time he can go ballistic on certain subjects: the incompetent impotence of the U.N. He describes both wars from a ground-level view, making them more understandable while maintaining their chaotic feel: a difficult, yet appreciated balancing act. He humanizes how inhuman war can be. He also describes his own increasing heroin addiction, which, while interesting, doesn't hold the attention of his war reportage. He telling us what he's seen in sometimes beautiful, always pungent prose. Its faults are few. My War Gone By, I Miss It So deserves awards, and mass readership.
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Summary: Stanley Kubrick and Thomas Harris could learn from this guy
Review: In a book that is almost as much a healing for the author as it is war correspondence, Anthony Loyd travels to Bosnia in the early 90s, to "find" a war that he never got to fight in Desert Storm as a British platoon commander. In this 321-page book of a self-loathing death-wish, the author travels between Central Bosnia, a London flat and Grozny, Chechnya, revealing the most intimate details of his heroin abuse and the war he seeks out as the only refuge from his addition. If this book had included a 17th-century composer and Stanley Kubrick's permission, Loyd could have written a sequel to "A Clockwork Orange", only on a national level. The almost-surreal nature of combat, both in the Balkans and in Chechnya, reveal the worst in combat, something not seen in the likes of World War II, Korea or even Vietnam. His harrowing tale of murder, rape and carnage on the front lines of Bosnia are a must read for anyone who will serve in the Balkans. One must appreciate the Hell that was forged by all three guilty parties in Bosnia and Loyd does a perfect job of capturing it. He also portrays the Bosnian people openly and accurately, accentuating their bravado as well as their kindness on a personal level. Also reflected in his work, is the pure evil that comes from a battle where the combatants are fighting for everything from Allah to fascism. Once you stomach the "stream-of-consciousness" chapters in which Loyd battles his addiction to heroin, he allows you to see the demons he is fighting and his need to go to war as a means of self-destruction in a time of his life where he is drifting between boredom, "smack" withdrawal and self disgust. Buy this book and experience the atrocities of war first-hand.
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Summary: Great Book
Review: Anthony Lloyd does an exceptional job putting into words the events he witnessed during the war in Bosnia and the events of his life. This is somewhat of a diamond in the rough book. It surprised me with its poetic memoir qualities as well as succeeding in painting a picture of the realities of the war. Lloyd shows that he cannot only take pictures but he can also create pictures with his words. He was at the center of much of action in this war and created relationships with people and leaders on all sides. His story offers many insights about the details of this war, including the tragedies. It is also a personal tale of his life, his struggles with addiction and struggles in his family and with friends. This book really does not fit into a particular category except the 5 star category.
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Summary: How do you get your hands around this one?
Review: This beautifully written memoir brings home some very unpleasant truths: war can be fun and addicting (along with horrific and repulsive); the casual abandonment of social constraint can be fun and liberating; and after too much fun it is difficult to downshift into "normal" society (so self-medicate). It is an extraordinarily passionate and personal book, and evokes equally intense reactions in its readers as the reviews attest. It is not too hard to jump from Anthony Loyd's discomfited Englishman looking for his place in the world to the thousands of muhajideen wandering through the Balkans and Central Asia looking for theirs. Post 9/11 we may be dealing with thousands of these war addicts for years to come. The chapter on Chechnya, in which Loyd temporarily leaves the Balkans for the even higher dosage action in Grosny (in which the Russians reportedly hit the city with 30,000 shells in a single day) is the worth the price of the book alone. It puts the far more modest US bombing campaign in Afghanistan into a certain perspective. In the end, this book is so intense that it is difficult to write about it at all. Read it and see for yourself.
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Summary: Hits you at your core
Review: Anthony Loyd's writing is almost perfect, his talent one I've not seen in some time, and the compelling story he tells is one that needs to be read by those who glibly support war as if it were merely a chess game absent blood or bone. Whether intentional or not, Loyd reveals the roots of human evil-- malignant narcissism-- in the stories of his own family life and drug use that he intersperses with his telling of the war. His obvious reason for including these stories is his attempt at explaining why he was drawn-- no, addicted-- to environments of such destructiveness. With or without his awareness, he put on exhibition the roots of warfare itself (see such books as "Escape from Evil", "The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness", "People of the Lie", etc, for an understanding of malignant narcissim). I highly recommend "My War Gone By".
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Summary: A terrible time. Brilliantly written.
Review: This book painted a picture with photographic clarity about the nightmare that is civil war. It describes how earth can become hell for many of its citizens as evil takes over. I went to Sarajevo a few years after reading this book. Although there were bullet and shell holes in nearly every building, the people were moving forward. This book has helped me best understand what had happened in Bosnia and what really happens in war.
Rating:
Summary: Wow!!
Review: This book doesn't try to gloss the horrors of war over with honey or nationalism it real, its raw and it hits you like a sledge hammer. If you like gritty realism I highly recommend that you pick yourself up a copy of the book. At some points this book even manages to inject a little humor into a bad situation and for that I am thankful because otherwise I wouldn't have been able to read it, its still a great book. Just make sure you have a nice stiff drink handy you'll need it.
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