Besieged: Life Under Fire on a Sarajevo Street

by Barbara Demick

For four centuries, Logavina Street was a quiet residential road in a cosmopolitan city, home to Muslims and Christians, Serbs and Croats. Then the war tore the street apart. In this extraordinary eyewitness account, Demick weaves together the stories of ten families from Logavina Street. For three and a half years, they were often without heat, water, food or electricity. They had to evade daily sniper fire and witnessed the deaths of friends, neighbours and family. Alongside the horrific realities of living in a warzone, Demick describes the roots of the conflict and explains how neighbours and friends were turned so swiftly into deadly enemies. With the same honest, intimate reporting style which won her so many plaudits for Nothing to Envy, Barbara Demick brilliantly illuminates one of the pivotal events of the twentieth century, and describes how, twenty years later, the residents of Logavina Street are coping with its consequences.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, War, Politics, Journalism, Reportage, Travel

240 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1996

About the author

Barbara Demick is an American journalist. She is the author of Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood (Andrews & McMeel, 1996). Her next book, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, was published by Spiegel & Grau/Random House in December 2009 and Granta Books in 2010.

Demick was correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer in Eastern Europe from 1993 to 1997. Along with photographer John Costello, she produced a series of articles that ran 1994-1996 following life on one Sarajevo street over the course of the war in Bosnia. The series won the George Polk Award for international reporting, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for international reporting and was a finalist for the Pulitzer in the features category. She was stationed in the Middle East for the newspaper between 1997 and 2001.

In 2001, Demick moved to the Los Angeles Times and became the newspaper's first bureau chief in Korea. Demick reported extensively on human rights in North Korea, interviewing large numbers of refugees in China and South Korea. She focused on economic and social changes inside North Korea and on the situation of North Korean women sold into marriages in China. She wrote an extensive series of articles about life inside the North Korean city of Chongjin. In 2005, Demick was a co-winner of the American Academy of Diplomacy's Arthur Ross Award for Distinguished Reporting & Analysis on Foreign Affairs. In 2006, her reports about North Korea won the Overseas Press Club's Joe and Laurie Dine Award for Human Rights Reporting and the Asia Society's Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Asian Journalism. That same year, Demick was also named print journalist of the year by the Los Angeles Press Club. In 2010, she won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction for her work, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. The book was also nominated for the U.S.'s most prestigious literary prize, the National Book Award.

Demick was a visiting professor at Princeton University in 2006-2007 teaching Coverage of Repressive Regimes through the Ferris Fellowship at the Council of the Humanities. She moved to Beijing for the Los Angeles Times in 2007 and became Beijing bureau chief in early 2009. Demick was one of the subjects of a 2005 documentary Press Pass to the World by McCourry Films.

Reviews

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

The stories of Balkin conflict have always been painfully close to home. Though I was just 12 at the beginning of the Bosnian war, and safely half a world away in Australia, I remember vividly the protests in the streets, the side-eyes Croatian and Serbian immigrants gave each other and my father, foreign newspaper forever in disarray in his lap, images of Bosnians screaming, crying on the front page.

Much like the people of Sarajevo who lived harmoniously together for centuries, in spite of their religious differences, I grew up around many Serbs, Croats, Bosnians/Bosniaks, Kosovoians, Macedonians, Greeks and simply, or not so simply, 'Yugoslavians'.

My father was born in this troubled region. I can recall relatives on my father's side, siblings and cousins, stopped speaking for decades over disputes about flags and language.

It is so frustrating to witness firsthand how one people of the same ethnic line can kill each other over flags and language. And borders.

Logavina Street is written so concisely, with just enough background information that someone new to the issue could easily pick it up and gain a basic understanding of the war. Demick, who wrote the extraordinary Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, pierces the heart of readers with personal accounts direct from the citizens of Sarajevo.

I can't help but wonder how civilian Serbs might receive the book, which was written with a decisive and unapologetic anti-Serb tone, or "Serb Aggressors" as they were called. Though this book is written primarily from the Bosniak (Muslim) point of view, Bosnian Serbs (Orthodox) suffered the same deadly fate as their neighbors at the hands of Serb aggressors. What could more poignantly illustrate the futilty and randomness of war than that?

[Saman · Rating 4 out of 5]

تمام خانواده های خوشبخت شبیه یکدیگرند، اما هر خانواده بدبختی به شکل خاص خود بدبخت است... تولستوی

خانم باربارا دمیک در اواسط دهه نود میلادی که بوسنی در آتش جنگ شعله ور بود به این کشور سفر می‌کنه و با رفتن به سارایوو پایتخت این کشور و زندگی در خیابان لوگاوینا- خیابانی مسکونی متشکل از 240 خانواده و جمعیت حدود هفتصد نفر- از دل جنگ روایتی مستند رو در این کتاب تهیه کرده. در طی دو سال حضور نویسنده در بوسنی با اهالی این خیابان به گفت و گوهای متعدد پرداخته اما کتاب به صورت مصاحبه نیست و به نظرم خیلی هم خوب شده که صرفا مصاحبه نیست.. خانم دمیک روایات و مشاهدات خودش رو با نقل قول ها و روایات اهالی منطقه تلفیق کرده و حاصل نهایی کار تبدیل به یک کتاب خواندنی و البته به شدت غمگین شده.

روایات آورده شده در کتاب بسیار صریح، بی پرده، بی روتوش و واقعی از جنگ و جهنمی است که مردم در اون گرفتار شدند. فقدان‌ها، کمبودها، دردها،رنج‌ها و حتی انکارهای اولیه و بدبینی های در ادامه چیزی است که در کتاب مشهوده. خانم دمیک خیلی جاها مرگ و رنج رو به صورت کلی بیان نکرده و به صورت کاملا دقیق توضیح داده. مثلا جایی سر جدا شده‌ی مردی رو به کلم تشبیه می‌کنه یا زمانی که از نوجوانی میگه که آلت تناسلیش بر اثر حمله دشمن قطع میشه.اینجا خبری از ارائه یک شمای کلی نیست، بلکه خانم دمیک دست مخاطب رو می‌گیره و به عمق بدبختی و رنج میبره.اینکه تیتر مطلب رو با نقل قولی معروف از تولستوی شروع کردم برای تنوع درد و رنج مردمانی است که در این کتاب نویسنده ازشون حرف زده. نویسنده به ارائه یک تصویر کلی اکتفا نمی‌کنه، بلکه میخواد واقعیت رو به خالصانه ترین شکل ممکن به مخاطبش نشان بده و در انجام این هدف به نظر من کاملا موفق شده. جمیع این توضیحات مبین این مساله است که کتاب حتما شما رو متاثر خواهد کرد و بهتره در زمان مناسبی مطالعه بشه.

شخصا چه در ادبیات و چه در جنگ هر چه تصویر ارائه شده خالق اثر، دهشتناکی و از اون مهم‌تر خانمان سوزی جنگ این شر مطلق رو بهتر نمایان کنه برای من ارزش و اعتبار بیشتری داره. اثر خانم دمیک این ویژگی‌ها رو داشت و از خوندنش راضی‌ام.کتاب تو این سبک زیاده.میشه کتاب معروف خانم اوریانا فالاچی، یعنی زندگی،جنگ و دیگر هیچ رو تو همین سبک و سیاق دونست. بعد از مدت‌ها یک کتاب خوب از نشر ثالث خوندم!

[Elaine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many years ago, when I was very young and very intense about my belief that the world was capable of being saved, I went to a talk at the 92nd Street Y by some writer I admired. I can't remember who it was, now. What I do remember is that the writer used the talk to speak passionately and eloquently about the then-recent 50th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and linked that to then on-going Siege of Sarajevo. It was heartbreaking. I hadn't really been following the story before then - I was a student and preoccupied- but after that night I became obsessed with the horrible news coming out of what seemed like such a unique and precious place. And since that time, my preoccupation has lingered, as I've read several books about the war and the region (with the standouts being by far Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, which is a history book written 75 years ago, and Venuto al Mondo, which is a novel - in other words, neither is really a fair comparison for this book!), and finally, in 2010, got to travel to Bosnia.

All this is by way of saying that I came to Demick's book with a solid amateur knowledge of that period, and so perhaps I found it less fresh for that reason. I thought Demick's Nothing to Envy was truly amazing - a combination of great writing with great reporting and completely riveting subject matter. Logavina Street was clearly the work of a less fully-formed writer. And I didn't realize before reading it that Logavina Street was an old book (Demick's writings are from the time of the siege, and there's only a single chapter epilogue to cover the 15 years between then and re-publication). So that perhaps added to my disappointment, and that was my own fault, for not paying closer attention to this being a re-issuance.

But overall, while competently written and researched, I didn't feel immersed the way I did in Nothing to Envy. There were a few too many subjects and it was difficult in that crowd for their individual stories to grab you the way Demick wants them to - and the way they deserve to. At times the madness and the claustrophobia shines through - I especially liked the wartime recipes - but the book feels a bit surfacy at times - probably because it began life as a series of newspaper articles. That said, it does have many telling and heartrending moments - and it's a period in recent history that bears remembering and re-examining, not least because the central ethical question for outsiders - to intervene or not,and if so, when and how - remains at least as thorny and compelling as it was 20 years ago.

Demick's book also does a good job of conveying a phenomenon that I think about a lot - how quickly the abnormal (no power, or a barter economy, or risking your life to go the market) becomes utterly mundane, basically, the enormous human capacity to adapt to the unthinkable by routinizing. I saw a bit of that in New York after 9/11 and then again this year after Hurricane Sandy, and in my more apocalyptic moments, I suspect we have a lot more of that to come. Logavina Street conveys that dislocation well - it gets at the ordinariness of the unbearable. When I was done with the book, and thinking back to that talk at the 92nd Y, I realized that when I was very young, I thought of Sarajevo as a horrible throwback to the past (another holocaust in Central Europe). In anxious middle age, I'm more worried that Sarajevo is our future. Time for some light reading, I think!

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

You look ahead of you.  You look in front of you.  You look behind you.  Everyone you see looks like your race, like your ethnicity, like YOU.

But, there are issues.  There are problems within some of you.  After the fall of Yugoslavia, your government decides to secede and now you represent the antithesis of what others want; you are a target for violence. Political structures in ruins, people become barbaric in nature; others are killing your friends because of what ethnicity they claim to be and where they live. They are afraid to tell their names; it shows who they are and what they are.  The bombing of bridges, schools and bazaars are common place; there are random acts of killing everywhere.  Children and other civilians perish in the thousands.  Thousands of them.  This is Bosnia.  These are Bosnian/Serbian/Croatians alike.

Logavina Street lies in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. These are accounts from those who lived it and their amazing, yet brutal story of how people survived a war of land, power and ethnic cleansing. Each account is as harrowing as the next.  The author’s (Demick) approach at telling these stories of desolation, depression, atrocity, mayhem and ultimate survival is something you will never forget.

Recommended to all.

[Bridget · Rating 5 out of 5]

Second reading August 2019:

I loved and lived and breathed this book years before I even went to Sarajevo and on a second reading, now that I've been there, it has earned a place on my list of all-time faves. It is so true to the feeling you get in that city and I only wish I could have brought a copy of it with me on my trip so I could cross-reference every page.

Things that stood out to me on this reading
1. How well this book does something that similar books sometimes struggle with (We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled, as good as it is, comes to mind): namely, painting a vivid picture of The Before. The author never lived in pre-war Sarajevo and there are no flashbacks in this book and yet through the stories of its characters you FEEL the loss of the lives they had before the siege.

2. How resourceful Sarajevans cobbled together wartime recipes to make do, wrote them down, and then later in the war, went back to those recipes and realized they couldn't even scrape together those desperate ingredients anymore.

3. How one day, the electricity went off, and just...never came back on, except sporadically. And then how at first you cancel school and keep your kids in the basement where they are safe from mortars and snipers...until you don't. It's not sustainable. Kids need to play and go to school and that doesn't suddenly become un-true just because there's a war on.

If you can't go to Sarajevo, read this book. If you CAN go to Sarajevo, then read this book beforehand and bring it with you on your trip.

First reading September 2012:
My across-the-street neighbor is from Sarajevo. One time we got to chatting while our kids played and she told me the story of how she emigrated to America as a teenager during the wartime siege. It involved the promise of a scholarship, a tunnel under the airport and a crazy bus ride into Croatia. At the time, even as I recognized that hers was an amazing journey, I only vaguely understood the context of it. I hadn't yet read Balkan Ghosts, so my frame of reference for 1990s Bosnia was something like, "Yes, I was alive during that time and I remember there being some fuss about Sarajevo, and yet not enough fuss, somehow, and also there was that song by The Cranberries."

Now, after reading Logavina Street (and Balkan Ghosts over a year ago), I understand so much more. Just as she did with Nothing to Envy, Demick here has woven the ordinary lives of ordinary people into an extraordinary account of life in harsh conditions. On every page of this book, I was touched by the strength of the Sarajevan people during the siege. Every day that I read this book, I went to sleep having dreams of Sarajevo. When I wasn't reading the book, I was thinking about it. It was that kind of all-encompassing reading experience.

By the way, before I started reading the book, I mentioned to my neighbor that I had it and while she hadn't heard of the book itself, she said something like, "Oh yeah, Logavina Street," and then told me some stuff about that part of town. You know, just your average stories of growing up in a war-torn city. I can't wait to ask her for more details of her emigration, because the book actually talks about the tunnel under the airport and mystery American scholarships waiting for Bosnian youth and even crazy bus rides into Croatia.

(Also by the way: the edition I read was published in 2012, and has a couple of new chapters added to the 1996 version. It seems like once Nothing to Envy was such a success, Demick was able to get this book re-published. I can't believe it ever went out of print!)

[Calzean · Rating 3 out of 5]

The 1995 version is amended with a revisit in 2011. The opportunity to rewrite the whole book into something much better was lost. The telling of the Siege of Sarajevo is always maddening mysterious and desperately sad. This book focuses on the residents of one street and the mix of Moslems, Serbs, Jews and Christians. It works in parts but not as a whole.
How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone remains the best book I've read of this period in the Balkans.

[Emeyté · Rating 5 out of 5]

«Multi-ethnicity, tolerance, diversity — these were the values that brought Susan Sontag and Bono and foreign correspondants to Bosnia during the war and what ultimately drew the Clinton administration to intervene. Bosnia's very creation as an independent state was to create a neutral space in the wreckage of Yugoslavia where residents did not have to be a Serb, Croat or Muslim. One wants to believe that that's still worth saving».

El compromiso de Barbara Demick con la verdad periodística la llevó a compartir el asedio más largo y cruel de la historia moderna con sus víctimas (que también fueron sus héroes). Conozco este tema a fondo, es la pasión de mi vida. Pero poquísimas veces me he topado con un retrato tan digno, justo, imparcial, respetuoso y genuino de una pesadilla triste y largamente ignorada por el resto del mundo (más allá de la ración correspondiente y efímera de titulares en los años 90). Demick nos ayuda a comprender los antecedentes, tan complejos y cargados de matices. Pero, sobre todo, nos ayuda a comprender ese milagro incomprensible que es Sarajevo: el milagro del triunfo de la alegría de vivir ante la miseria, la locura y la barbarie.

Me quito el sombrero ante Barbara Demick. Ojalá la vida me deje aportar un grano de arena la mitad de valioso que el suyo en el propósito de divulgar el fracaso que para la humanidad es la desaparición de la Bosnia multicultural y plurirreligiosa.

[Irene · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love the way Demic makes the political so personal by connecting the lives of ordinary people to larger national events. In this book, she follows several families from the same Sarajevo neighborhood during the war of 1992-1995. Beyond the headlines, the tragedies that make the TV news, are the daily struggles, the broken psychies, the devastated lives of people who live behind the bombed out windows.

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is just something so incredibly poignant and heartbreaking when one reads about real families in a war zone trying to keep living somewhat normal lives in very unnormal and dangerous circumstances. This book really brought the Bosnian Serbian conflict home to me. When people are forced to live in the backrooms or inner rooms of their homes, trying to keep their families safe and healthy, with very little in the way of food or medical care, work their gardens while being randomly bombed or shot at, it cannot fail but make a deep impression. Demick actually lived in this neighborhood' with these courageous people, talked and ate with them. I admire her greatly for writing this book and bringing to light the real people affected by this horrible conflict.

[Lorenzo Berardi · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Besieged" is a book about life in war time Sarajevo wrote by Barbara Demick in 1996 after spending some time there at various intervals between 1992 and 1995 as the correspondent of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The reason why this stuff has recently been re-published is the success recently gained by "Nothing to Envy" the brilliant book by Mrs Demick about life under the North Korean communist regime.

There is, therefore, a gap of almost 15 years and more than 5 thousand miles between what Barbara Demick wrote about Sarajevo in the 1990s and Pyongyang nowadays. Not to mention all the rest.

The book formerly known as "Logavina Street" and now published under the title of "Besieged" with the addition of a slight editing and two extra chapters at the end is good but far from being excellent as "Nothing to Envy" is.

On the one hand, Mrs Demick was younger then and less experienced in dealing with the personal stories of the people she wrote about. On the other hand, what happened in the region now named Bosnia & Herzegovina in the early 1990s cannot be fully explained in this book, but Demick tried her best to make things clearer here (an afterthought of the author, I guess).

Don't expect a book about the Yugolav Wars, though.
"Besieged" is about the siege of Sarajevo in its different stages as seen from the people living or finding shelter in one of the nicer and most diverse streets in town: Logavina.

Here and there the names of Ilja Itzebegovic, Radovan Karadzic, Slobodan Milosevic appears just like a few lines dedicated to the awful events in Tuzla and Srebrenica even though, the city of Mostar is never mentioned here.

Nevertheless, "Besieged" is a good and poignant book which achieves the goal to show the hard lives of those (Muslim-Bosniaks, Croats, a few Serbs) who were caught by the Serbian-Chetniks barbarian siege to Sarajevo and how they managed to get by surviving shelling, snipers' fire and starvation.

This is an interesting and important reading, but at the end of the day Mrs Demick could have made it better when she wrote it and so much better while re-publishing the book.
The city of Sarajevo has disappeared from the newsreels and what "Besieged" lacks is an insight on how things are going on now in town.

[Wsclai · Rating 4 out of 5]

My feeling is mixed reading the book. I know that life in the Seige of Sarajevo in the 90's was difficult but it turned out to be unimaginably harsh. I have no idea that people struggled for years to live a normal life in the most absurd circumstances (no electricity, no gas, no security and no nothing). It was naive of me to think that no one would stay in the centre of the war zone but the truth was most did not leave Sarajevo, a place where they call 'Home'.

The news coverage and TV footages of the seige are nothing comparable to the impacts the book gave me. I might have been shocked to see those images from TV two decades ago but I am horrified to find out the details from the book. It vividly puts the war that happened years ago and hundred thousands of miles away right in front of me. Reading the book is like standing in the middle of the Sniper Alleys. I keep asking myself how these Bosnians could survive the deprivation, cold winters, all the shooting and shelling and numerous innocent deaths. It broke my heart to see that children growing up during the war have forgotten what fresh milk is and thought that meat comes in a can. The war not only sacrificed the lives of the dead, but also those of the surviving. The death toll of this war is undoubtedly much lower than that of WWII but the devastation it brought to people in Bosnia should never be taken too lightly.

The ones who initiated the war are, of course, sinful but the slow response and half-hearted assistance from the UN and NATO are also unforgiving. I am appalled to learn about the senseless food rations given (e.g. biscuits left over from the Vietnamese War in the 60s, flour instead of bread) to the victims. Some people suggested if there had not been the US election, the war would not have ended evetually. And I believe it is true.

Although the war has come to an end for years, it seems that the differences within Bosnia Herzegovina and distrust among Serbs, Bosniaks and Croats remain, if not intensify. It is hoped that their country would never succumb to the lunacy of war again.

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm fascinated and horrified by the Bosnian war, and especially the siege of Sarajevo. It's almost incomprehensible that brutal siege took place in the 1990's under the watchful eye of the UN and NATO and western governments. I've read fictional accounts of the conflict, but this is the first non-fiction account I've read. Barbara Demick encapsulates the brutality of the Sarajevo siege by concentrating on one street in Sarajevo. She tells the story of the families along that street, and it is a very effective way to describe what happened. Honestly, this story and the whole Bosnian conflict is a cautionary tale for our time - I'll leave it at that.

[Kinga (oazaksiazek) · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Gdzie indziej też można cieszyć się życiem, ale nie tak jak w Sarajewie. To miasto ma wyjątkową duszę."

Sarajewo to moje ulubione europejskie miasto. Rok temu wręcz bezczelnie zrzuciło z pierwszego miejsca magiczny Rzym i bez ostrzeżeń rozgościło się w moim sercu. Ta stolica posiada wszystko to, co lubię. Z zewnątrz wydaje się szarym i owianym ponurą historią miastem, ale wewnątrz wszystko jest takie, jakie być powinno.

To dziwne wrażenie spacerować po ulicy, o której później czyta się w książce. Widzieć codzienność, która jeszcze kilkanaście lat temu była zupełnie inna. Zachwycać się budynkami, które tak wiele przeszły. Podziwiać starszych ludzi, którzy radzą sobie w takiej okolicy i śmiało podchodzą z ciężkimi zakupami pod górkę.

Tak naprawdę, ta pozycja nie porusza tylko i wyłącznie tematu życia na jednej z sarajewskich ulic, ale także omawia realia wojny toczącej się w całej przestrzeni tego miasta.

Autorka wielokrotnie dopuszcza się powtórzeń niektórych szczegółów oraz nieco chaotycznie opisuje pewne sprawy. Zarzuty w stosunku do niej nie są tu jednak najważniejsze. To opisywana rzeczywistość budzi przerażenie w czytelniku. Potrząsa nim, zmusza go do refleksji.

"W oblężeniu. Życie na sarajewskiej ulicy" prezentuje tyle faktów, ile była w stanie zgromadzić autorka przez lata swojej ciężkiej pracy. W książce śledzimy dzieje całych rodzin oraz losy poszczególnych bohaterów, mieszkańców, osób z krwi i kości. Podążamy z nimi do pracy, szkoły czy nocnego klubu. Chowamy się w ciemnych piwnicach przed ostrzałem snajperów. Walczymy o lepszy byt dla bliskich i nielegalnie ciągniemy prąd, aby móc ugotować posiłek z resztek dostępnych produktów. Udajemy się po wodę na drugi koniec miasta, choć nie jesteśmy pewni, czy będziemy w stanie potem wrócić do domu. Martwimy się o osoby zaginione oraz modlimy za tych, których los nie oszczędził. Jesteśmy bezsilni i łzy płyną nam z oczu. Nic nie możemy zrobić. Musimy czekać.

Ta pozycja to codzienność, w której nikt z nas nie chciałby żyć. Właśnie dlatego warto po nią sięgnąć.

Polecam.

[Emeyté · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re-Lectura 2025: este libro es parte de mí. Esta ciudad, aún más. Que su historia, que es la de todos nosotros no caiga en el olvido.

Suscribo cada palabra que escribí hace dos años en la reseña original. Cinco estrellas como cinco soles, a mi estantería de favoritos vitales para siempre.

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«Multi-ethnicity, tolerance, diversity — these were the values that brought Susan Sontag and Bono and foreign correspondants to Bosnia during the war and what ultimately drew the Clinton administration to intervene. Bosnia's very creation as an independent state was to create a neutral space in the wreckage of Yugoslavia where residents did not have to be a Serb, Croat or Muslim. One wants to believe that that's still worth saving».

El compromiso de Barbara Demick con la verdad periodística la llevó a compartir el asedio más largo y cruel de la historia moderna con sus víctimas (que también fueron sus héroes). Conozco este tema a fondo, es la pasión de mi vida. Pero poquísimas veces me he topado con un retrato tan digno, justo, imparcial, respetuoso y genuino de una pesadilla triste y largamente ignorada por el resto del mundo (más allá de la ración correspondiente y efímera de titulares en los años 90). Demick nos ayuda a comprender los antecedentes, tan complejos y cargados de matices. Pero, sobre todo, nos ayuda a comprender ese milagro incomprensible que es Sarajevo: el milagro del triunfo de la alegría de vivir ante la miseria, la locura y la barbarie.

Me quito el sombrero ante Barbara Demick. Ojalá la vida me deje aportar un grano de arena la mitad de valioso que el suyo en el propósito de divulgar el fracaso que para la humanidad es la desaparición de la Bosnia multicultural y plurirreligiosa.

[Marcin Trysła · Rating 5 out of 5]

Świetna książka! Zapadnie w pamięci na długie lata

[Electra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Riveting.
Le siège de Sarajevo - un lointain souvenir et la honte ressentie à l’époque de vivre une vie normale alors qu’à deux heures d’avion, des gens mouraient sous les tirs des snipers et des mortiers. Sarajevo, Mon amour.

[Preethi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having loved Demick's two other books on North Korea and Tibet, I knew I was going to love this book - I expected that the tone of narration would be real, factual and not be subjective in her views, I knew the stories would all be about real people and their experiences as they lived through the conflict, I knew Demick would give a closure towards the end on how the lives of the people she chronicled in the book would be after a while, and I expected her to not pick a side even about the conflict.

This book delivered on all these expectations.
As a 90s kid growing up in India which had considerable USSR influence (I grew up reading a lot of Soviet magazines that my Dad subscribed for me, I remember reading a lot of Russian fairy and folk tales set in Siberia etc; the falling of the Berlin Wall has been an incident that had fascinated me since forever; the Cold War and how the countries picked sides and India chose to be non-aligned is something I read in school; I was fascinated by the split of Czechoslovakia; I followed the split of Yugoslavia closely for a while and remember reading about the war between Bosnia & Serbia), I knew about the wars fought in the Balkans only by headlines, so delving into the details of this siege of Sarajevo by Serbia is great learning for me.
I felt for the people of Bosnia who only wanted a multi-ethnic country and for whom the Dayton pact is not really a justice but more like a cease-fire. I appreciated Demick's notes on how the youth of today in Bosnia might get attracted to Islamic radicalization and the perspectives based on real stories.
And I am in awe of the people who continued living amidst the shell attacks and sniper shots with shrapnel in their bodies and their lives interrupted all because they did not want to leave their homes and thus give in to the ethnic cleansing.

Read this book for all this learning and a great insight into one of the wars we grew up around but haven't read much about.
And now I am going to re-read Joe Sacco's Safe Area Gorazade.

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

BOTW BBC Radio 4

Blurberoonies - To mark the twentieth anniversary of the start of the siege of Sarajevo the award winning journalist Barbara Demick revisits her evocative eyewitness account of how the residents of one street in the city endured three and half years of living in a warzone. Today, bellicosity is met with denial before harsh and terrifying realities kick in.

Besieged: Life Under Fire on a Sarajevo Street is the first UK publication of Barbara Demick's first book. To counter the effects of "compassion fatigue" the book began life as a series of articles evoking the daily lives of several families and how they endured years of deprivation, terror, and the loss of loved ones and friends. Her portrayal of Logavina Street's residents is at once intimate and vivid.

Barbara Demick's coverage of the war in Sarajevo won the George Polk Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Award. She is a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times based in Beijing. In 2010 she won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea.

Read by Laurel Lefkow Abridged by Julian Wilkinson Produced by Elizabeth Allard.



4 - In this episode, a ceasefire and new causes of anguish.

5 - Barbara Demick's eyewitness account of the siege of Sarajevo. Read by Laurel Lefkow. Hostilities end and, 20 years on, a look at how life has changed on Logavina Street.

Terrible events however nothing new brought to the table with this:
Low 3*

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I knew the street I wanted to write about the first time I walked up it. Even battered by war, it was a beautiful street…”

Logavina Street is a marvel. A hard-hitting, unflinching look at the two years Demick spent on this “six-block long history lesson”. She followed along with several families, in this Sarajevo neighborhood, as they led their daily lives, under a terrifying siege. Sniper fire and mortar-attacks came in a flash, leaving carnage and destruction. Dealing with food shortages, lack of electricity and water. Burning anything they could find, to keep warm. Despite this bleak and forbidding existence, the spirit and determination of these people is triumphant.
This is also the best book on the Bosnian conflict, that I have read, giving me a much better and detailed understanding of what happened in those war-ravaged countries. It also reminded me, how poorly the American response was to this atrocity. Funny, the US seems to go to war at the drop of a hat, these days but in the 90s, we sat on our hands, while genocide swept this area of eastern Europe. That’s tragic.
“To know Logavina is to know Sarajevo, and to understand what this city once was, and what it has become. To know Logavina is to witness the strength and ingenuity that ordinary people can muster to survive.”

[Alice Otto · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favourite books of all times! Demick manages to connect very personal individual stories with the timeline of a war that too many people don't know enough about. It's a must read for everyone who wants to understand the political situation in the balkans and how quickly a peaceful multi-ethnic country can turn into a war zone and destroy generations to come. Not to forget that Srebrenica was the biggest war crime since the Second World War. There is not enough awareness!!!
As I'm half-bosnian myself, being surrounded by stories of war, trauma and loss, it was an emotional read but despite grateful that this book has been written. It's heartbreaking and astounding at the same time how people live through the war, cope with everyday terror and try to remain some kind of normalcy.

[Keen Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Stars!

I read Demick’s “Nothing To Envy” years ago and really enjoyed that, and it remains one of the most essential texts on contemporary North Korea. Initially I thought that she struggled to find a clear path to where she wanted to be with this, but the longer this went on the more coherent and cohesive this became.

She certainly captures the full on horror and confusion of war, and many of these accounts are like dirty, ragged snapshots, as we hear of how so many nearly starved to death on a diet of vintage Vietnam war biscuits and Balkan war time recipes as bombs and bullets rained down on them.

The people of Bosnia and Sarajevo soon learned the hard way about being naïve and desperate enough to put their faith in the US government to come to their rescue. As Demick says, “The international community needed to rescue its own credibility even more than Bosnia.” And only after a series of massacres and eventual genocide did old Slick Willy and the UN come to help in any meaningful way, by which time far too much avoidable death and destruction had already occurred.

[Łysy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kolejny w tym roku reportaż opisujący zmagania ludzi w nadzwyczaj ciężkich warunkach.

Opis życia w Sarajewie w trakcie oblężenia robi wrażenie. Historie i losy bohaterów książki są przejmujące i łapią za serce. Książka wiele wyjaśnia na temat konfliktu w dawnej Jugosławii, zwłaszcza osobom nie znającym tematu i nie rozumiejącym jego złożoności.

Nie tylko sam opis historii, ale również obserwacje autorki dokonane po latach od opisywanych wydarzeń są zdecydowanie warte uwagi.

[Dilan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Das Buch bietet einen sehr intimen Einblick in das Leben der Bewohner:innen der Straße Logavina in Sarajevo während des Bosnienkrieges. Als weiße Journalistin ist es Barbara Demick durch das Führen von Interviews während des Krieges gut gelungen, einen authentischen Einblick in die Lebensrealität und Gefühlswelt zu gewähren. Die individuellen Geschichten sind sehr berührend und zeigen, was hinter den anonymen Zahlen von Todesopfern und körperlich sowie psychisch Verletzten steckt.

[aubrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

this book is too relevant in the context of what's happening in the world today.

[Hannah Forman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is devastating but it serves as an important reminder about the importance of fighting for multiculturalism in the face of ethnic hatred. Also hits different reading this while living in Kosovo.

[Ingrid · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well written, but chronologically more difficult to track than “Nothing to Envy” and “Eat the Buddha.” Also, because the cast of people was greater in number than the two other books, I felt that I had to keep going back to make sure I wasn’t mixing up the people in the storylines. Really interesting concept and execution of telling the stories of the lives of those who lived on a regular neighborhood street during the war.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I remember the events of Sarajevo, but if I ever knew the causes, I had forgotten them. Barbara Demick, at the time a young foreign correspondent living and reporting from Sarajevo throughout its civil war, beautifully captures both the spirit of the people of Sarajevo and the nightmare they endured.

For centuries a city where religions coexisted peacefully (30% of marriages were of mixed religious backgrounds), fashionable and affluent Sarajevo became a war zone when Serbian nationalists besieged it in an attempt to expand Serbian territory.

Demick's reporting and book focused on the residents of Logavina Street, located in a predominantly but far from exclusively Muslim neighborhood. On Logavina lived imams, doctors, hairdressers, members of the Croatian military, orphans, etc. A microcosm of the residents of the city, rich and not, Muslim, Serb, Croatian, neighbors who before the war had seen their differences as minimal and were shocked that anyone would use religion as an impetus for war. Not in Sarajevo. Not their home.

The horrors of the war, the deaths, the deprivations, the dignity of those who endure - these are easy to remember, but they are not the most important lessons. We need to learn that no place is immune to such violence, that the hatred of even a small minority can destroy peace, that radicalism arises not from true religion but from avarice and lust for power.

[Magdalena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full disclaimer: I love Demick's writing. I would read her shopping lists and probably find them riveting, so it's no surprise I loved this book. While less cohesive than her later works because it was cobbled together from her reporting on the siege of Sarajevo, it's still a compelling, insightful read and a great introduction to one of the bloodiest episodes of Europe's recent history. Yet, this book is no downer. Even though it was written before Nothing to Envy, it exudes the same love and admiration for her subjects and their resilience in the face of adversity. It's truly a beautiful read.

[Tree high · Rating 4 out of 5]

♥️😔

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Remember back in the 1990’s, the war(s) that went on for years in (the former) Yugoslavia? I remember them vaguely; sadly, it was the type of topic that I was sort of aware of, but it was so far removed from my life, and seemingly so complex, that I never really felt like I had a handle on it.

But that kind of changed in the early 2000s, when Miss Katarina and her husband and young daughter moved to town. She was ballet teacher for at least one of the girls, and I got to know her too since I’d play piano for some of the classes she taught at the ballet school. They had come to the US once they got the prized “green cards” that allowed them to. They had lived in Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia.

So, with Katarina as a personal connection, "Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood" sounded like an interesting read to me. Also, it’s written by the author of "Nothing to Envy" — a book I found to be truly amazing with its look inside the lives of people in North Korea.

Journalist Barbara Demick lived in Sarajevo while the wars/ethnic conflicts/etc were going on, from 1992-1996. This book doesn’t focus on the fighting at all, but rather on the lives of civilians living during the period on Logavina Street in Sarajevo.

What was the war/conflict all about? Even after reading this book, I can’t honestly tell you. Apparently that’s not all that unusual: “No wonder, then, that Americans were baffled by the Bosnian war. So, too, were Bosnians. The conflict was commonly defined as ‘ethnic warfare,’ yet everyone comes from the same ethnic stock. The difference among people is primarily in the religions they practice, yet to explain the fighting as a ‘religious war’ would be equally misleading, since most Yugoslavs were not religious people.” That this war would happen here was especially strange given that Sarajevo has been called “the Jerusalem of Europe,” referring to it as a city where people of various faiths live in harmony.

Regardless of the reasons, the four years of the siege sounded like a miserable time to live in the city, with utilities cut off, and snipers frequently shooting both children and adults who ventured outside their houses. “I never liked camping, and that was a little bit what it was like,” said one resident of Logavina Street.

There were heartbreaking stories, such as that of a grandmother whose granddaughter escapes Sarajevo for a brighter future elsewhere. “I asked if she was afraid she might never see her granddaughter again. ‘No,’ she replied, without hesitation. ‘I am looking forward to it. I will be happy when Delila leaves.'” That kind of sums up motherhood, I think.

Another sad tale was that of many dogs in the city, whose owners set them free when food shortages made pet ownership something they could no longer afford. “Minka, a dog lover, remembers the beautiful purebreds wandering Logavina Street, an Irish setter that would lope through the yard behind their apartment, several Dalmatians, and a distraught, starving poodle who still sported an elegant pre-war coiffure.” I remembered all the abandoned, wandering dogs I saw in Peru. Just sad.

The conflict in Yugoslavia wrecked the area’s economy, with no currency, 75% unemployment, and “those who worked were not paid.” Sounds like our covid years, on steroids. Other times, the stories brought to mind issues with Ukraine. I recently read about Ukraine’s President feeling less than grateful for the billions Americans have sent to his embattled nation. Similarly, in this book, one civilian railed, “Aren’t you ashamed that your country has done nothing but stand by and watch us die?” Something I’ve observed in life is that if you work to earn something, others will expect you to share it with them. They may be grateful if you do, but they almost certainly will be angry if you don’t. Maybe it’s just that hard situations tend to bring out the worst in people.

One hardship for Yugoslavians fleeing to another country was that, if they had a professional job, they most likely couldn’t get a similar job elsewhere. A Yugoslav doctor said, “I know a (former Yugoslav) doctor in Florida. He is cleaning swimming pools. Maybe he is satisfied with that … I have a friend, a pediatrician. She went to Germany and the only job she was offered was washing old people’s asses in a nursing home.” I remembered my friend Katarina’s husband. Katarina said that in Yugoslavia he had had a complex job involving coin production. In the US, he just found a job in a factory.

I’m glad I read the book because it gave me insight into this period. I still don’t feel like I have a good handle on it, but apparently few do. I found the book hard to follow, with all the unusual names, almost all ending in -vic. The author has a few pages at the beginning listing all the families covered, which helps, but I still never really felt like I “knew” most of them. I think maybe she just tried to cover too many families. She definitely improved as a writer in her next book, “Nothing to Envy.”