Janine Di Giovanni’s Followers (147)

Janine Di Giovanni

Born

The United States

Website

http://janinedigiovanni.com/

Genre

Nonfiction, Foreign Correspondence

edit data

Janine di Giovanni is one of Europe's most respected and experienced reporters, with 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".

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 Janine di Giovanni is one of Europe's most respected and experienced reporters, with 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".

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 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 (Bloomsbury/Knopf 2011); The Place at the End of the World: Essays from the Edge (Bloomsbury 2006); Against the Stranger (Viking/Penguin 1993) 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.

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.

With Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, Managua, Nicaragua, January, 1990. Photo by Marc Schlossman
Di Giovanni's book, The Place at the End of the World, a collection of her essays, was published by Bloomsbury in January, 2006. 2006 has also brought projects on Muslims in Europe, the French riots, AIDS in South Africa, September 11 anniversary features, and the current political situation in Israel among others. She is at work on another book for Knopf/Bloomsbury, Up at Tito's Villa, set in Montenegro.

Janine di Giovanni is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, a contributing writer to the New York Times, Granta, Newsweek and many ...more

Combine Editions
Janine Di Giovanni’s books

Average rating: 4.03 · 4,976 ratings · 647 reviews · 24 distinct works • Similar authors

	The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria 4.06 avg rating — 3,273 ratings — published 2016 — 27 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Ghosts by Daylight Love, War, and Redemption 3.94 avg rating — 430 ratings — published 2011 — 19 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Madness Visible: A Memoir of War 4.17 avg rating — 261 ratings — published 2003 — 11 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Vanishing: Faith, Loss, and the Twilight of Christianity in the Land of the Prophets 3.93 avg rating — 192 ratings — 10 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Place at the End of the World 4.30 avg rating — 100 ratings — published 2006 — 6 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Quick And The Dead: Under Siege in Sarajevo 3.94 avg rating — 34 ratings — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Eve Arnold: Magnum Legacy by Janine Di Giovanni, Susan Meiselas (Foreword), Andrew E. Lewin (Foreword) 3.78 avg rating — 23 ratings — published 2015 — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Against the stranger: Lives in occupied territory 3.85 avg rating — 13 ratings — published 1993 — 4 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Vanishing: The Twilight of Christianity in the Middle East 4.50 avg rating — 2 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Fall of Rome : An American Family 1945-1995 did not like it 1.00 avg rating — 1 rating — published 2011	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

More books by Janine Di Giovanni…

Quotes by Janine Di Giovanni (?)

“And this is the worse part of it — when you realize that what separates you, someone who can leave, from someone who is trapped in Aleppo, or Homs or Douma or Darayya, is that you can walk away and go back to your home with electricity and sliced bread; then you begin to feel ashamed to be human.”
― Janine Di Giovanni, The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria

tags: syrian-civil-war

4 likes

“The lowest depth that a human being can reach is to perform or to receive torture. The goal of the torturer is to inflict horrific pain and dehumanize another being. The act not only destroys both parties' souls — the victim's and the perpetrator's — but also the very fabric of a society. By subjecting men or women to enforced violence, sexual violation, or worse, you transform them into something subhuman. How does someone return to the human race after having been so brutalized?”
― Janine Di Giovanni, The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria

tags: torture

3 likes

“War means endless waiting, endless boredom. There is no electricity, so no television. You can't read. You can't see friends. You grow depressed but there is no treatment for it and it makes no sense to complain — everyone is as badly off as you. It's hard to fall in love, or rather, hard to stay in love. If you are a teenager, you seem halted in time.

If you are critically ill — with cancer, for instance — there is no chemotherapy for you. If you can't leave the country for treatment, you stay and die slowly, and in tremendous pain. Victorian diseases return — polio, typhoid and cholera. You see very sick people around you who seemed in perfectly good health when you last saw them during peacetime. You hear coughing all the time. Everyone hacks — from the dust of destroyed buildings, from disease, from cold.

As for your old world, it disappears, like the smoke from a cigarette you can no longer afford to buy. Where are your closest friends? Some have left, others are dead. The few who remain have nothing new to talk about. You can't get to their houses, because the road is blocked by checkpoints. Or snipers take a shot when you leave your door, so you scurry back inside, like a crab retreating inside its shell. Or you might go out on the wrong day and a barrel bomb, dropped by a government helicopter, lands near you.

Wartime looks like this.”
― Janine Di Giovanni, The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria

tags: syria, war

2 likes

See all Janine Di Giovanni's quotes »

Topics Mentioning This Author

topics	posts	views	last activity
Challenge: 50 Books: JB's Challenge List for 2017	151	100	Dec 22, 2017 07:48AM
Non Fiction Book ...: * Non-Fiction Book You Are Currently Reading or Just Finished ~ 2017	537	304	Feb 01, 2018 11:50AM
The History Book ...: * IMMIGRATION	85	166	Feb 13, 2021 08:32AM
Libri dal mondo: Libri ambientati in Siria	5	41	Sep 29, 2023 04:51AM
~Readers Sharing ...: TimInColorado's Reviews	74	15	Aug 11, 2024 09:02PM
Around the World ...: Syria	21	1132	Feb 18, 2025 01:39PM
The History Book ...: * SYRIA	187	476	Mar 08, 2025 11:17AM

More…

Is this you? Let us know. If not, help out and invite Janine to Goodreads.