I purchased this book as I will be in Sarajevo soon. I'm glad I did as I am gaining insight in to just how awful it was (I have not finished reading it). I look forward to walking down Logavina St while I'm there and seeing how (I hope) it has returned to it's former glory. It is shocking what they endured. I was surprised that the only copies I could find had to be shipped from overseas. They didn't even have it in the local library. The shipping was not expensive though, just took longer than normal to receive. It is well written and even has some pictures. Because the names are so foreign (for me), it is hard to keep track of who's who, but the author put a 'key' in front that makes a great cheat sheetA very good book with detail about the times and lives of people caught in the middle of a war that should never have happened.Published in 1996 and written by a journalist stationed in Sarajevo, covering the war years, this is a moving and vivid portrayal of the lives and experiences of the people of just one street in the Bosnian capital.I learned so much from this extremely readable account. The racial differences which we tend to perceive as cut and dried were so fluid in the tolerant and multi-ethnic city, where many were in mixed marriages, and where muslims were far from the often separate and hostile group we tend to see in our midst but happy to live like their neighbours, only distinguishable by their names. As President Izetbegovic observed, any attempt to divide the ethnic groups of Bosnia would be 'like trying to separate cornmeal and flour after they were stirred in the same bowl."For 3 1/2 years Sarajevo was under siege by Serb aggressors, snipers in the hills picking off civilian targets. With little gas, electricity and water and minimal rations, life was traumatic and grim. Everyone experienced deaths and injuries; some escaped, some resolutely stuck it out; the UN presence was pretty useless. The Americans who could have intervened sooner kept procrastinating... and when the Dayton Agreement was finally signed, it seemed that the Serbs were almost rewarded for their aggression by being granted a Serb enclave within Bosnia.Told from the perspectives of many different people - soldiers, schoolkids, OAPs, Muslims and Serbs, this book makes a complex situation come to life.This books states in clear and dispassionate terms the injustice, the hell that had to be endured by the ordinary peace-loving multicultural citizens of Sarajevo, trying to stay alive in a war they did not want, had not started and which split up families and friendships, all in the interests of survival.It brings back such memories! In Western Europe we had all been on tenterhooks, praying that the anticipated war would not break out and cursing the bumbling "diplomats" who allowed it to happen. We all knew the map of Bosnia by heart, usually with great arrows drawn across it to indicate the locations of invasions or of refugee movements, but we had no idea how the ordinary people were able to survive. This book, with its sensibly narrow focus and impartial narration of the main political background to the actions on the Sarajevo stage, certainly opens our eyes to how over a quarter of a million civilised Westerners could exist in a Mediaeval-type siege.You finish the book with a strong respect for the Sarajevans of that time, and a better understanding of how, 25 years later, present-day civilian life is still a struggle against corrupt officialdom in a broken economy.I read this book in one day. I knew very little about the Bosnian war before reading it, and came to purchase it after binge-reading the author’s other work, “Nothing to Envy” about North Korea. This book is similar, in that it traces the daily lives of citizens, who are simply trying to stay alive within the epicentre of a brutal war. The personal stories are what I enjoyed about this book, it gives an insight into the lives the people of Sarajevo had enjoyed before the war, and how much their lives changed during and after the conflict. They are stories of survival, devastation and of hope. Thoroughly recommendTo be honest, the first few chapters were a little hard for me for the 1st read and I was on the verge of abandoning this book as unread. So I left it for some weeks and came back to it. This 2nd time, I could not put down this book. Maybe the first time I was expecting some kind of history of the Yugoslavian war but that's my fault as Barbara Demick's book focus on the people, their lives during stressful situations and how they come out of it. I read previously the other book by Barbara Demick on North Korea and it was on of the best books of the year for me. I must say this book is a great book too and this journalist has enormous talent and courage to go in these countries and interview people in a honest way. This book show you the lives of a number of people in a particular street in Sarajevo at the start, during and after the war. It shows how the war affected the lives of ordinary people and the impact it will have on them for the rest of their lives. If you like investigative journalism type of books, then I highly recommend this one !I wanted to read this before a holiday in Bosnia that would include a few nights in Sarajevo. I'm so glad I did, it made the visit so much more meaningful, especially the walk I did up Logavina Street. It's weird when you've come to know the individual citizens through the book and then you walk past their houses. It's hard to believe that the population endured such suffering so recently in history, and how they've managed to rebuild the city and their lives.The book also helped to explain some of the ethnic tensions that you can still sense there today.An informative read of what the civil war was like for the people of one street in Sarajevo, I enjoyed the insight and have such a respect for the people that stayed, even for a while, out of loyalty to their city and their ideals of what they (and the city) stand for and all the hardships and risks they endured. The tenacity of the human race is covered here and I feel Ms Demick has really helped bring the events of 25 years ago back, and the world isn't so different now.