No Place Like Home: Echoes from Kosovo [Paperback]

Melanie Friend (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 7, 2001

British photographer and BBC radio reporter Melanie Friend has covered the Balkans since 1989. Her visits have been brief and always subject to film confiscation and surveillance. In 1999, as NATO bombs fell on Serbia, and ethnic Albanians fled Kosovo, Friend took portraits in the refugee camps of Macedonia. The 75 photographs and extraordinary interviews present one of the most profound, complex, and human documents of the recent history of the Balkans. As the centuries-old cycle of abuse enters a new phase, No Place Like Home explores life in the Balkans with fresh, unconventional insight.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Those who study world conflicts from afar tend to portray both the perpetrators and their victims through a series of politically correct phrases, often masking just what years of oppression, ethnic cleansing, and nationalistic intolerance (to name just a few terms often used to describe Kosovo) mean for the common people who must bear their consequences. This remarkable collection of interviews reveals how easy it is for those in power to manipulate the feeling of nationalism and systematically create an environment in which brutality becomes part of life. Friend, a British photojournalist who has covered Kosovo's political turmoil since 1989, has collected some 50 interviews that she conducted with Albanian refugees in neighboring Macedonia after the conflict culminated in early 1999. The compelling and often disturbing interviews and the 75 powerful photographs that accompany them serve not only to document the actual experiences of Kosovo's inhabitants but to help us understand why the region must remain multiethnic for the good of all. Finally, Friend acknowledges the difficulty faced by the international community in its attempt to bring peace to the region. Highly recommended for all interested in international conflicts. Natasa Musa, New York
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From the Back Cover

"Melanie Friend's remarkable photographs and interviews show us the human particularity that lies within phrases such as 'ethnic conflict' and 'civil war'-and help us understand how communal hatred and savagery can break out of (and into) the most peaceful field, the most ordinary living room, and what happens after it does. The power of her book doesn't come from obviously shocking pictures; the shock is the realisation that these suddenly-changed and cancelled lives were once so like our own.
--Ian Jack, editor, Granta

Product Details

• Paperback: 175 pages
• Publisher: Cleis Press; 1 edition (November 7, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573441198
• ISBN-13: 978-1573441193
• Product Dimensions: 11 x 9.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,126,079 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A study of the quiet -- often overlooked -- pain of war ..., January 30, 2002

By 

Judith M. Huerta (Berkeley, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: No Place Like Home: Echoes from Kosovo (Paperback)

It's a crying shame that the world hosts chronic bouts of uncivil wars all over the planet, and then their atrocities vie for our attention. It's a pity that the current, most florid acts of inhumanity (via the media) hold us in thrall and divert us from the grinding pain of recovery from similar acts elsewhere. The focus on the Miedle East has distracted us from other hostilities that changed the map and twisted lives. One such conflict is the tangle of unrest among Albanians/Serbians/Bosniaks and others who share, or shared, Kosovo.

Melanie Friend has created a book of portraits (visual and verbal) that attends to the pain and confusion between 1994 and 2000 in Kosovo. Her wonderfully quiet, understated photographs do not feed the sensationalistic. They speak to the almost mundane horrors of daily living in burned out homes; hiding in sewers; trying to stay clean after escaping with only the clothes on one's back; eating only bread for an entire month; eating cherries for an entire month; occupying one's time trying to keep a refugee camp tent clean, mostly to stay busy; clinging to a shred of photograph as a talisman of hope for a loved one's survival; and surviving chronic fatiuge when one is never safe enough to sleep through an entire night.

The author's photographs are reproduced with such pristine fidelity that they are by themselves graceful studies of form, color and light. Alongside the photographs, Ms. Friend's interviewees tell their stories, narratives in the stark flatness of truth as they experience it. They don't philosophize particularly, nor do they bang their political drums particularly, although I'm sure all cherish their personal philosophies and have political perspectives. They describe what happened to them, their families, and their homes. All were victimized. The speakers survived, but none have recovered.

You will not see a single severed limb, starving child, or mangled body in the book. The book will not burden you with the type of content that increases your anxiety or "compassion fatigue" to the degree that you must turn away. Instead, in quietude, the author gives you a current history of Kosovo's war and its aftermath with respect and sadness.

"No Place Like Home" is an elegant book that informs by taking one in and quietly personalizing the experience of war in one's homeland rather than beating the reader into insensibility with atrocities so graphic that one must tune out. It is a thoughtful, painful, gentle response to victims of war.

Photographs and text: Wonderful!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Praise for No Place Like Home: Echoes from Kosovo, December 17, 2001

By 

izzy nance (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: No Place Like Home: Echoes from Kosovo (Paperback)

This is a fantastic book! It completely transports the reader into the lives and experiences of the people of Kosovo. They are elegantly and honestly portrayed through Friend's unique choice of medium. She juxtaposes stunning photographs and gripping testimonies of her subjects, inspiring compassion and awe from her audience. Having a degree in International Relations, I found this book offered an insightful and fresh perspective on the situation in the Balkans, while remaining accessible to a wide audience. Beautiful!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Documentary Photography at its best!, December 7, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: No Place Like Home: Echoes from Kosovo (Paperback)

This is a book about war unlike any other. You are drawn in by the photographs and, somehow, the voices of the ordinary civilians telling you about their lives under the years of repression, the war, the flight from their homes and their return to the devastated towns and villages hit you with remarkable poignancy. The juxtaposition of these extraordinary photographs and the testimonies is truly remarkable. This is not only great documentary photography, it is also one of the most articulate and profound book about war I've ever read. Kudos to Melanie Friend! Very highly recommended!