Madness Visible: A Memoir of War [Hardcover]

Janine di Giovanni (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 11, 2003

From an internationally celebrated war correspondent, a searing firsthand chronicle–told with extraordinary immediacy–of the ordeal of the Balkan people during the continuing breakup of Yugoslavia.

As a reporter for The Times of London, Janine di Giovanni found herself a close witness to the cycles of violence and vengeance in cities and villages, in refugee camps, in slapped-together hospitals, and in the homes of citizens under siege. She begins her story in May 1999 in Kosovo. The world believes the Balkan wars are over, but violence persists. She follows the arc of the war from its earliest days through the staggering experience of the people who endured it: soldiers numbed by–and inured to–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.

She searches for the motives of the leaders who created this hell: Slobodan Milosevic and his wife, Mira Markovic, and such crucial though less well-known figures as Nikola Koljevic, who directed the siege–and accomplished the destruction–of Sarajevo, the city he claimed to love.

Di Giovanni’s story raises profoundly challenging questions: What can cause neighbors who have lived peacefully side by side for centuries to turn against one another with mindless brutality? What becomes of survivors when the fabric of an age-old community is destroyed? How should other governments react to mass murder in a neighboring country?

Acutely perceptive, unflinching, making the madness of war visible, this is an important work of reportage from the physical and psychological front lines.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"It is only possible to love one war," writes di Giovanni in this devastating memoir of the Balkans, quoting another intrepid war journalist, Martha Gellhorn. For Gellhorn, it was the Spanish Civil War; for di Giovanni, it's the series of conflicts that, since 1991, have consumed the republics of the former Yugoslavia. Expanded from a Vanity Fair article, this book presents a harrowing firsthand account of a region's spiral into madness. Di Giovanni, a senior foreign correspondent for The Times (London), was there almost from the beginning: she shuddered through the first icy winter of the Sarajevo siege (the longest in modern history); she sipped tea with Arkan, the dreaded leader of the ethnic-cleansing paramilitary Tigers; she stood shoulder to shoulder with Serb revolutionaries on "Day One" of the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic. The book deals primarily with di Giovanni's experiences covering the most recent war-1999's conflict in Kosovo-but it moves through time from the initial dissolution of Yugoslavia to the most recent, guardedly optimistic attempts at reconstruction. Di Giovanni provides ample historical context to the fighting (readers seeking to understand the separatist impulse of the Montenegrin Orthodox Church or Milosevic's "mother complex" have plenty of evidence to play with), but eventually, the names and dates of massacres and treaties pale next to the spectacle of pure horror: a dog trotting by with a human hand in its mouth; a crazed woman lying naked in full view of snipers, begging to be shot. Di Giovanni has written a tragic book that vividly memorializes the millions who suffered in the name of religion, nationality and ego. Map not seen by PW.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Anglo-American journalist di Giovanni assembles and extends her war reportage from the Balkans into an impressive overview of the disintegration of Yugoslavia. She reports the dreary and appalling events since the death of Tito and, especially, since 1992 in better prose than a good deal of the competition commands, though not even her accounts of individual survival and suffering break much new ground. She points the finger of blame squarely at the Serbs, however, for taking actions without which there would have been no crisis and whose dream of a greater Serbia is definitely as bloodthirsty as that of a Judenfrei Europe. She is also blunt about foreign intervention having been too little and too late, leaving NATO and the UN with blood on their hands and the real prospect of Balkan ethnic brawls erupting again for the World War I centennial. In all, a worthwhile discussion of whether the influence of the violence-never-settles-anything mentality now causes more violence than it prevents. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (November 11, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375410732
• ISBN-13: 978-0375410734
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,563,208 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #73 in Books > Travel > Europe > Serbia & Slovenia

More About the Author

Janine di Giovanni is a writer for The Times of London and Vanity Fair, a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The Spectator, National Geographic and many others. She also writes columns and Op-Ed pieces for the Wall Street Journal, and the International Herald Tribune. She frequently lectures on human rights abuse around the world. One of the world's most respected and experienced reporters, she has vast experience covering war and conflict. Her reporting has been called "established, accomplished brilliance" and she has been cited as "the finest foreign correspondent of our generation".

Her latest book, Ghosts by Daylight: A Memoir of War and Love, will be published by Knopf on September 20th.

Born in the US, she began reporting by covering the first Palestinian intifada in the late 1980s and went on to report nearly every violent conflict since then. Her trademark has always been to write about the human cost of war, to attempt to give war a human face, and to work in conflict zones that the world's press has forgotten.

She continued writing about Bosnia long after most people forgot it. In 2000, she was one of the few foreign reporters to witness the fall of Grozny, Chechnya, and her depictions of the terror after the fall of the city won her several major awards. She has campaigned for stories from Africa to be given better coverage, and she has worked in Somalia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Benin, Burkino Faso, Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe, Liberia, as well as Israel, Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans, East Timor and Chechnya.

During the war in Kosovo, di Giovanni travelled with the Kosovo Liberation Army into occupied Kosovo and sustained a bombing raid on her unit which left many soldiers dead. Her article on that incident, and many of her other experiences during the Balkan Wars, "Madness Visible" for Vanity Fair (June 1999), won the National Magazine Award. It was later expanded into a book for Knopf/Bloomsbury, and has been called one of the best books ever written about war. Madness Visible has been optioned as a feature film by actress Julia Roberts production company, Revolution Films.

Di Giovanni has written several books: Ghosts by Daylight: A Memoir of War and Love; The Place at the End of the World: Essays from the Edge; Against the Stranger about the effect of occupations during the first intifada on both Palestinians and Israelis; The Quick and The Dead about the siege of Sarajevo, and the introduction to the best-selling Zlata's Diary about a child growing up in Sarajevo. Her work have been anthologized widely, including in The Best American Magazine Writing, 2000.

She has won four major awards, including the National Magazine Award, one of America's most prestigious prizes in journalism. She has won two Amnesty International Awards for Sierra Leone and Bosnia. And she has won Britain's Grenada Television's Foreign Correspondent of the Year for Chechnya. In 2010 she was the President of the Jury of the Prix Bayeux for War Correspondents.

She is one of the journalists featured in a documentary about women war reporters, Bearing Witness, a film by three-time Academy Award winning director Barbara Kopple, which was shown at the Tribeca film festival and on the A&E network in May, 2005.

In 1993, she was the subject of another documentary about women war reporters, "No Man's Land" which followed her working in Sarajevo. She has also made two long format documentaries for the BBC. In 2000, she returned to Bosnia to make "Lessons from History," a report on five years of peace after the Dayton Accords. The following year she went to Jamaica to report on a little-known but tragic story of police assassinations of civilians, "Dead Men Tell No Tales." Both films were critically acclaimed.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Di Giovanni makes the Balkan madness all too visible..., May 19, 2006

By 

Adam Daniel Mezei "Adam Daniel Mezei" (Toronto, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Madness Visible: A Memoir of War (Paperback)

...for us, her readership, that is.

What strikes me most about this superbly-told memoir is the visceral reality with which author Di Giovanni succeeds in recollecting her experiences of the period and place with razor-sharp detail. Even more shocking once I'd learned (towards the end of Madness Visible) that she'd absconded alone to Cote D'Ivoire, Ivory Coast, of all locales to compile her notes and pen this book. For *that* alone, I think she deserves heapful praise; all the moreso in that the bombs began to fall in the Ivoreans own civil conflict at the time of her sojourn there. Yikes...

Curious about this particular work is that Janine chooses to commence her account of the bloody Balkan decade with the NATO bombings of Kosovo in 1999. After a suitable reflection on the read, I have yet to figure out why that was the case...almost like we were going back in time with her -- or the experience which had a lesser impact upon her was delivered first.

Theories all. Curiosity, it was. Merely curiosities.

A frightening element which shines resoundingly through is the war correspondent's mythic love for the field of battle, almost as if the daily rush of adrenaline which war reporters mainline from conflict zones around the globe is like the elixir of their lives, their consummate vice in a manner of speaking.

I've heard about this several times before, by reading other sources and listening to speeches given my those who've passed thorugh bloody battlefield hells, and am fully cognizant of the phenomenon. Di Giovanni makes no bones about the ravages of it, and is forthright with her admission that "it was only possible to love one war," quoting the immortal words of Spanish Civil War correspondent Martha Gellhorn. That's a statement, if I've ever heard one before.

As I flipped through page after captivating page, my mind drifted back to thoughts of the year 1984, the Winter Olympics in the Bosnian capital, and how only a decade (or less) previous, the world banded together on those same majestic slopes surrounding Sarajevo (in Pale, for instance) in an act of peace, harmony, and amateur sport.

Positively nightmarish it might have been for some of the athletes to have returned to witness the aftermath of the carnage.

A stray thought which came to mind as I pondered the read.

Di Giovanni is a very talented scribe with a flair for narrative. I hope to read more of her stuff in other places, and I will certainly be keeping an eye out for her.

Kudos on the tip for the Richard Holbrooke book. I've already added it to my library.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A. Donn, October 9, 2005

By 

A. Donn - See all my reviews

This review is from: Madness Visible: A Memoir of War (Paperback)

Madness Visible is a powerful and extremely moving account of war. It reads like a novel, but its not and this is also why it's so harrowing. So much is contained in a sentence, on a page (action, danger , fear , sorrow) that sometimes you feel compelled to put it down and re-read the passage over, just to be able to take it all in. Janine di giovanni is able to give us unobstructed access to the frontline of war.Is it possible that human beings in our world should continue to be subjected to so much madness and suffering?

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Madness Visible: A Memoir of War, October 7, 2005

By 

Tim Judah - See all my reviews

This review is from: Madness Visible: A Memoir of War (Paperback)

Perhaps the most bizarre incident recounted in Janine di Giovanni's tales of war comes at a time of peace. She is in Sarajevo, six years after the end of the war, and a radio station in Cape Town wants to interview her about a piece she has written for her newspaper, the Times. To her horror the interviewer asks her about snipers and aid convoys, as though the Bosnian war was still in full swing. The fact that it had ended had simply passed the South African by. "It was my obsession," she writes, but not that of others.

So this is a book about di Giovanni's obsession. The Yugoslav wars, or at least the Bosnian and Kosovo chapters of it. This is compelling reportage at its best. Grisly and depressing at times, of course, but also most revealing too. As reporting wars and how to do it, becomes, in the wake of Iraq, ever more a subject of discussion, di Giovanni is brave to admit that she for one does not believe in objectivity.

Discussing the siege of Sarajevo which lasted from 1992 to 1995, she writes: "We were guilty, we knew, of perhaps only covering one side of the war, but for us there was only one side: the side that was getting pounded, that was being strangled slowly, turning blue and purple." That side was the Bosnian Muslim side, and those Serbs who always said that they were "demonised" by the international media will see vindication in these words. After all, they will point out, Alija Izetbegovic, the then leader of the Bosnian Muslims was being investigated for war crimes by The Hague war crimes tribunal when he died in 2003 di Giovanni does not talk of Muslim crimes. But, as she says, "the truth wasn't necessarily objective; it was where we were sitting, what we were seeing." And she was seeing civilians cut down by Serbian snipers and old people literally freezing to death in a nursing home.

The book begins with the Kosovo war in 1999, moves on to Milosevic's Serbia in the months afterwards and then flashes back to the Bosnia of the early 1990s. There are telling chapters exploring the minds of two key Bosnian Serb leaders, the Shakespearean scholar Nikola Koljevic, who made his own tragedy before killing himself, and Biljana Plavsic who, racked by remorse, unusually pleaded guilty to war crimes at The Hague.

Di Giovanni recalls that the doyenne of a previous generation of war reporters, Martha Gellhorn, once said, referring to the Spanish Civil War, that "it was only possible to love one war" and the rest became duty. Di Giovanni would have us believe that Yugoslavia was her greatest love and that Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Iraq and the all the other places she has reported on were duty. In fact, reading between the lines, the true love seems to have been Sarajevo and Bosnia. If so, then even Kosovo was duty - but she does write about it well. A good book and a great read.