Born to a distinguished family steeped in military tradition, raised on stories of wartime and ancestral heroes, Anthony Loyd longed to experience war from the front lines-so he left England at the age of twenty-six to document the conflict in Bosnia. For the following three years he witnessed the killings of one of the most callous and chaotic clashes on European soil, in the midst of a lethal struggle among the Serbs, Croatians, and Bosnian Muslims. Addicted to the adrenaline of armed combat, he returned home to wage a longstanding personal battle against substance abuse.
These harrowing accounts from the trenches show humanity at its worst and best, through daily tragedies in city streets and mountain villages during Yugoslavia's brutal dissolution. Shocking, violent, yet lyrical and ultimately redemptive, this book is a breathtaking feat of reportage, and an uncompromising look at the terrifyingly seductive power of war.
About the Author :
Anthony Loyd is a British foreign correspondent who has reported from numerous conflict zones including the Balkans, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Iraq and Chechnya. A former infantry officer, he left the British army after the First Gulf War and went to live in Bosnia. My War Gone By, I Miss It So is his memoir of that conflict.
Review :
"Battlefield reportage does not get more up close, gruesome, and personal. . . . The fear and confusion of battle are so vivid that in places, they rise like acrid smoke from the page." -New York Times
"Loyd's strongest writing is in his descriptions of carnage--of the sound and smell of shellfire; of the sexual release of blasting away with an automatic machine gun . . . This is pure war reporting, free from the usual journalistic constraints that often give a false significance to suffering. And Loyd waxes eloquent on the backblast of his war time, a heroin addiction that begins before his arrival and becomes the only way he can survive his breaks from the fighting." --Salon
"Both beautiful and disturbing." --Wall Street Journal
"First-rate war correspondence . . . [in] the great tradition of Hemingway, Caputo, and Michael Herr." --Boston Globe
"My War Gone By, I Miss It So moves at the pace of a thriller. Why bother reading war fiction when you can read such intense reporting?" --LA Weekly
"[Lloyd] has written an account of its horrors that will wipe out any thoughts you might have had that we have reached the limit of the worst human nature has to offer. The monstrosities he describes are beyond belief. But the book is also compelling for what it tells us about fear." --National Geographic Adventure Magazine
"A testament to his honor and courage. And while it would be impossible for one man to tell the whole story, his book shines with small truths and larger, philosophical ones about life and war." --New York Post
"Brave and admirable . . . with vivid descriptions of shelling, human suffering, and new depths of fear." --Christian Science Monitor
"Loyd has used a zoom lens to put his readers nose to nose with the surreal and horrifying brutalities [in Bosnia] . . . this book is so powerful that, at times, you will have to put it down. But not for long." --Denver Post
"A raw and ragged book for a war that officially announced to the world that what's old is new in conflict: war fought between neighbors divided by religion or ethnicity, and fought hand to hand. . . . And his writing from the middle of the action is visceral, rife with urges that chaos and anonymity spur. . . . This may be the book these wars needed--an angry, confused howl against the obliteration of all we consider humane. Loyd has taken a step toward resuscitating the somnolent language of conflict-at-a-distance, bringing a war often seen through a haze of euphemism into sharp and jarring focus. This great horror in a century of horrors finally has its jeremiad." --Philadelphia Inquirer
"Loyd has a matter-of-fact writing style that augments rather than softens the carnage he describes. At the same time he can go ballistic on certain subjects: the incompetent impotence of the U.N., for example, or the apathy of the Western public. . . . He describes both wars from a ground-level view, making them more understandable while maintaining their chaotic feel: a difficult, yet appreciated balancing act. He humanizes how inhuman war can be. . . . Loyd has gone to hell and back and is telling us what he's seen in sometimes beautiful, always pungent prose." --Seattle Times
"Writing with a combat veteran's dark knowledge and a seasoned war correspondent's edgy, hesitant desire to cling to some sort of confidence in humanity, Loyd delivers a searing firsthand account of the war in Bosnia that successfully blends autobiographical confession and war reportage. . . . Not like any other book on the Yugoslav war, his gripping, viscerally subjective chronicle puts a human face on the tragedy as it mourns the strangled soul of multiethnic Bosnia." --Publ
