Springcleaning – Book 7 “The Quick and the Dead” by Janine Di Giovanni

Janine Di Giovanni is a war reporter. Her book The Quick and the Dead was written just after the war ended and is about the conflict in Bosnia in the early 1990s. The author particularly concentrates her narrative on the siege of Sarajevo when Serbian forces were encamped on the hills that surround the city and targeted civilians with snipers and missiles. I am very ashamed that although I remember this war on the news I don’t really know much about how and why it started other than that it was precipitated by the breakup of Yugoslavia. You don’t need to know this information, however, to read and appreciate this book because it is about the people that the author met and got to know in the city and what they experienced,

This is not always an easy book to read because what happens to people in war conditions is horrendous. Those with power abuse it and inflict cruelties on others or, which may even be worse, totally ignore their situation and allow them to suffer and die. The author hasn’t got much time for the UN peacekeeping forces or the other agencies which come with international attention and even less for reporters who arrive only to get a heart-breaking story and disappear again with no real understanding of the suffering or the people. She shows how people in wartime conditions may become very selfish or may be generous but are usually desperate and are, therefore, the prey for those who are criminal and unscrupulous.

It is the individual stories that make the book. The elderly people freezing to death in their care home because there is no power. The orphans who roam the streets. The people who cannot wash because there is no water. The medical staff operating without anaesthetic and painkillers. The people whose careers have disappeared leaving them without money or hope. The families that are dispersed as refugees. The lives cut short because people are queuing for food in the open and are shot.

It’s not a long book but it has quite an impact which is intensified because the author knew these people and saw their situation first-hand. I like memoirs and biographies and I see that I got this book at my favourite Oxfam Bookshop although I think that it has been awaiting my attention for quite some months, if not years. I am going to keep it now and have made a place for it with my many other memoirs.