The Road To Sarajevo

Gen Mackenzie has pretty much seen and done it all when it comes to UN peacekeeping operations. From fairly innocuous duty in the Sinai, to a more complex situation in Cyprus and Central America, to the ultimate test for the UN--the Balkans.?Gen Mackenzie's insights also highlight how the UN has adapted (or failed to adapt) to the growing complexities of multinational peacekeeping, in an age where superpower rivalries are no longer able to keep warring factions in check.?Worthy of note is the battle Mackenzie faced dealing not only with the warring factions in Bosnia, but also the warring faction's ability to utilize the omnipresent media to shape public opinion.?Mackenzie's story of the beginning of UNPROFOR should be mandatory reading for those attempting to pursue multinational peacekeeping efforts in a complex, multiethnic environment.

Full story of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip on June 28, 1914, an act that exploded Europe into World War I.

On June 28, 1919, the Peace Treaty was signed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, five years to the day after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo triggered Europe's precipitous descent into war. This war was the first conflict to be fought on a global scale. By its end in 1918, four empires had collapsed, and their minority populations, which had never before existed as independent entities, were encouraged to seek self-determination and nationhood. Following on from Haus’s monumental thirty-two Volume series on the signatories of the Versailles peace treaty, The Makers of the Modern World, 28 June looks in greater depth at the smaller nations that are often ignored in general histories, and in doing so seeks to understand the conflict from a global perspective, asking not only how each of the signatories came to join the conflict but also giving an overview of the long-term consequences of their having done so.

By narrating the Sarajevo assassination in a broad historical context, Misfire contends that the most consequential political murder in modern history would have remained inconsequential if not for the decisions made by the leaders of Europe's Great Powers.

This brilliant novel with universal resonance tells the story of three people trying to survive in a city rife with the extreme fear of desperate times, and of the sorrowing cellist who plays undaunted in their midst. One day a shell lands in a bread line and kills twenty-two people as the cellist watches from a window in his flat. He vows to sit in the hollow where the mortar fell and play Albinoni’s Adagio once a day for each of the twenty-two victims. The Adagio had been re-created from a fragment after the only extant score was firebombed in the Dresden Music Library, but the fact that it had been rebuilt by a different composer into something new and worthwhile gives the cellist hope. Meanwhile, Kenan steels himself for his weekly walk through the dangerous streets to collect water for his family on the other side of town, and Dragan, a man Kenan doesn’t know, tries to make his way towards the source of the free meal he knows is waiting. Both men are almost paralyzed with fear, uncertain when the next shot will land on the bridges or streets they must cross, unwilling to talk to their old friends of what life was once like before divisions were unleashed on their city. Then there is “Arrow,” the pseudonymous name of a gifted female sniper, who is asked to protect the cellist from a hidden shooter who is out to kill him as he plays his memorial to the victims. In this beautiful and unforgettable novel, Steven Galloway has taken an extraordinary, imaginative leap to create a story that speaks powerfully to the dignity and generosity of the human spirit under extraordinary duress.

A moving and compelling true story about two sisters fighting for survival in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war

One of the 25 Books That Inspired the World (1989–2014), World Literature Today A remarkable and bracing collection of “classic anti-war writing” from a Croatian writer whose piercing prose recalls Kurt Vonnegut and Aleksander Hemon (Richard Flanagan, Booker Prize–winning author) Miljenko Jergović’s remarkable debut collection of stories, Sarajevo Marlboro, earned him wide acclaim throughout Europe. In “melancholy, dreamlike” prose, the stories in Sarajevo Marlboro “recall Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, but Jergovic’s book is the strongest of the three” (Maud Newton). Croatian by birth, Jergović spent his childhood in Sarajevo and chose to remain there throughout most of the war. These stories are distinctly of the material world, and they are shaped by Jergović’s deeply personal vision, subterranean humor, and a razor-sharp understanding of the fate of the city’s young Muslims, Croats, and Serbs—the minute details of their interior lives in the foreground, the killing zone in the background.