Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood

I'm very pleased that Barbara Demick's "Logavina Street" got a second life after her brilliant (and brilliantly received) book on North Korea,  Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea . That book has been a justifiably big smash. Publisher Spiegel & Grau (a Random House imprint) was smart to go back and re-release her 1996 Sarajevo work given Demick's new, higher profile.By all means, fans of Demick's writing should get their hands on this new paperback edition. Her original narrative ends in mid-1995. The new paperback features a new chapter, 'Return to Logavina Street,' which has a 2011 coda to the story. That chapter, plus a new epilogue, bring a new perspective to her work. I especially liked this passage from the 'Return' chapter (about her June 2011 visit):"Since the 90s I have been back to Sarajevo twice, once in 2007 and more recently in 2011. Each time, I was struck by how much it looked and felt the same. Now that I'm living in Asia, I'm accustomed to dynamic cities constantly reinventing themselves. When I leave Beijing for a holiday, I come back to find the building next door demolished and new skyscraper rising in my backyard. Not Sarajevo. The city is timeless, almost immutable. Along the stone alleys of the Bascarsija, the jewellers are tapping away behind shopfronts with the same names: Kasumagic, Cengic. Even the music is the same 1980s technopop. So little has changed on Logavina Street that I can almost navigate my way with my eyes closed."Like in 'Nothing to Envy,' Demick's winning technique is to crystallize the story from the large and complex down to the personal. In the North Korea book, we saw that country and its truths through the eyes of six defectors. Here, we see the Sarajevo siege through the eyes of the residents of one famous street. It's a work that - despite the passage of 17 years - has relevance today with the recent capture and ongoing trials of Radovan Karadzic' and Ratko Mladic'.Moreover, even today, Demick portrays a 'peace' that is shaky at best. She notes that "[e]vents that might lead to another war are easy to imagine: if Republika Srpska tries to secede from Bosnia..." She quotes think tank International Crisis Group's ominous conclusion: "[I]f Srpska's leaders continue driving every conflict with Sarajevo to the brink, as they have done repeatedly to date, they risk disaster. The agility of leaders and the population's patience need only fail once to ignite serious violence."

"Logavina Street is a six-block-long history lesson. To know Logavina is to know Sarajevo, and to understand what this city once was and what it has become."For centuries, Sarajevo was a city of Bosniak Muslims, Serbian Orthodox, and Croat Catholics-- almost equal in population and existing in harmony. People often celebrated all the religious holidays and the only way to know who belonged to which ethnic group was their first name. Even after the fall of Yugoslavia resulted in the civil war, residents of Logavina Street refused to see each other as enemies.Author Barbara Demick follows families living on this iconic street as they try to survive the war. She documents their stories of years without electricity, heat and sufficient food. Families moved into the safest interior room of their homes; sitting by a window could be a deadly risk. Through years of shelling and snipers, the people of Logavina persevered.I'm a fan of Demick's work, and I enjoyed this book as much as I hoped I would. I was too young to really remember any coverage of the Bosnian war, and I feel I learned a lot about the topic. Like Demick's other two books, I highly recommend this one.

The book itself is wise and ripe with good characters that share a deep sense of pride and fear. Having been young during the conflict and witnessing my locals schools adopt Bosnian as a language, the conflict became more mysterious and it's story and history needed to be uncovered. The atrocities are horrendous and little was done to really bring it to justice. This book is a grand first hand view of life in a besieged town. Meeting the people who had nothing and surviving in the ways they did is incredibly humble to read about, but sad that more could and should've been done.If a large scale history is what you're after, his book will offer enough to get started but focuses its energy on bringing the victims to life. I had a problem with some of the word choices that didn't distract the experience but were wrong. Notably is the usage of the term sniper. It's used liberally as if it he best way to describe someone shooting another. It does offer a hint of intimacy, it's not always the best or proper way to describe a machine gunner shooting kids.I will be recommending this book to anyone who wants to know more about the cruelty of war and politics. And also as a way to boast the strength of a unified city.

I read this book many years ago, and remember thinking that I could never walk by the people on my multi-ethnic, many religioned New York City street again without thinking of what the writer, Barbara Demick has revealed about the inhabitants of a few blocks on a street in Sarajevo. So many years later, I'm reminded in a re-reading of Logavina Street of the gift this writer has given us. Demick's elegant, and heart wrenching detail of lives challenged, person by person, neighbor by neighbor, each carefully drawn as vibrant souls simultaneously illuminates my own confusion about what was happening in that country. It was if they were imagined people created as a work of fiction, instead of people she could track down years later. I have often wondered what became of them, and just as I could not explain that conflict, or even how it was resolved, I am intrigued by how they have survived. Resilience has no magic alchemy. Courage emerges from the deepest place, and perhaps it is conflict that gives us hope. Demick is the kind of master journalist who can capture a truth and raise it from the ashes of that horrible conflict.

História actual de realidades, que nunca deverão ser esquecidas, excelente leitura, aconselho vivamente.

Great read: very objective, and personable at the same time.

I never get disappointed with Demick’s journalistic acumen.