Journalist Timothy Judah witnessed firsthand many of the most horrifying episodes of the war in former Yugoslavia while on assignment from 1990-1995. Judah offers here a history of the Serbs from medieval times to the present, combining a gripping personal description of the war with a skillful analysis of the historical and cultural context out of which it emerged. For this paperback edition Judah adds observations on the emergence of a more moderate Bosnian Serb leadership, and on the worrying signs of a possible new war, this time in Kosovo.

With numerous articles and interviews, this collection presents a wealth of materials appearing in book form for the first time along with reflections on events twenty-five years after the official end of communist Yugoslavia and the beginning of the war in Bosnia.

"A historical study of the treatment of Jews in Yugoslavia after Nazi ideology was adopted, with an emphasis on the ways Jews survived and were rescued by those who put their own lives in peril"--Provided by publisher.

“Vigorous, passionate, humane, and extremely readable. . . For an account of what has actually happened. . . Glenny’s book so far stands unparalleled.”—The New Republic The fall of Yugoslavia tells the whole, true story of the Balkan Crisis—and the ensuing war—for those around the world who have watched the battle unfold with a mixture of horror, dread, and confusion. When Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence in June 1991, peaceful neighbors of four decades took up arms against each other once again and a savage war flared in the Balkans. The underlying causes go back to business left unfinished by both the Second and First World Wars. In this acclaimed book, now revised and updated with a new chapter on the Dayton Accords and the subsequent U.S. involvement, Misha Glenny offers a sobering eyewitness chronicle of the events that rekindled the violent conflict, a lucid and impartial analysis of the politics behind them, and incisive portraits of the main personalities involved. Above all, he shows us the human realities behind the headlines, and puts in its true, historical context one of the most ferocious civil wars of our time.

In this brilliant book, Roger Cohen of The New York Times weaves together the history of Yugoslavia and the story of the Bosnian War of 1992 to 1995, as experienced by four families. “I have tried to treat the story of Yugoslavia, which lived for seventy-three years, as a human one,” Cohen writes in this masterly book, which, like Thomas L. Friedman’s From Beirut to Jerusalem and David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb, makes us eyewitnesses at the center of historic events. In the aftermath of the Cold War, the Bosnian conflict shattered the West’s confidence, reviving Europe’s darkest ghosts and exposing an America reluctant to confront or acknowledge an act of genocide on European soil. Through Cohen’s compelling reconstruction of the twentieth-century history that led up to the war, and his account of the war’s effect on everyday lives, we at last find the key to understanding Europe’s most explosive region and its peoples. “This was a war of intimate betrayals,” Cohen goes on to say, and in Hearts Grown Brutal, the betrayals begin in the family of a man named Sead. Through his search for his lost father, we relive the history of Yugoslavia, founded at the end of World War I with the encouragement of President Woodrow Wilson. Sead’s desperate quest is punctuated by the lies, half truths, and pain that mark other sagas of Yugoslavia. Through three more families—one Muslim-Serb, one Muslim, and one Serb-Croat—we experience the war in Bosnia as it breaks up marriages and sets relative against relative. The reality of the Balkans is illuminated, even as the hypocrisy of the international response to the war is exposed. Hearts Grown Brutal is a remarkable book, a testament to the loss of a multi-ethnic European state and a warning that the violence could return. It is a magnificent achievement that blends history and journalism into a profoundly moving human story.