|
|
Virtual Macedonia Bookstore - The Diary of a Political Idiot: Normal Life in Belgrade
|
List Price: $14.95
Our Price: $9.42
Your Save: $ 5.53 ( 37% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Cleis Press
|
Average Customer Rating:   
|
|
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 949.7103
EAN: 9781573441148
ISBN: 1573441147
Label: Cleis Press
Manufacturer: Cleis Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 200
Publication Date: 2000-10-30
Publisher: Cleis Press
Studio: Cleis Press
|
|
|
|
|
|
Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating:
Summary: Everyday life in hell
Comment: Until I happened on this book, I didn't know that I was interested in what it was like to be a Serb while NATO was bombing Serbia (and Milosevic's troops were slaughtering Albanians in Kosovo). As much as Tesanovic despised what Milosovich and other Serbian nationalists were doing (in her name), she was also outraged by the casual acceptance of "collateral damage," that is, the destruction of civilian targets (including one that counted: the PRC embassy in Belgrade) and killing of civilians by carefully targeted NATO (US) bombs.Tesanovic uses "idiot" in an ancient Greek sense, as meaning a common personwho cannot be trusted to make public decisions: "I am unable to make judgements. I see no options I can identiy with.... All the political options sound aggressive, stupid or far-fetched compared to my simple needs" as a mother. "I don't feel safe here, or happy, or free. I'm a refugee in my own city." Belgrade is/was a city with refugees from the "ethnic cleansing" of Croatia, even as Serbs engaged in "cleansing" of Serbia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. The Serbian nationalists considered Tesanovic a traitor; she considered them dangerously deluded and criminal. "In my country," she wrote, "uniforms always take away the power of speech from citizens, because uinforms carry guns, and citizens carry fear, so there is a permanent civil war going on between uniforms and civilians. Although she defended foreign intervention again national barbarism, she was far from enthusiastic about the sanctimoniousness of the forces of civilization.Her despairing analyses of those in Serbian and in UN uniforms are acute, but what is most fascinating about the book is the detail about everyday life: a female cousin dying of AIDS, other women deciding to have abortion from concern with the toxins they have been exposed to from bombed buildings, the children with no school getting bored and ever more unmanageable in the dark, intermitent electricity, visits from friends whose water supply has been cut off.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not too different from other war diaries I have read
Comment: This story is not much different from similar diaries andaccounts I have read about other peoples pacifist accounts inconflicts such as in Korea, Indo-China and Lebanon. The same pacifistattitudes and vibes filter through. Reading Tim Judah's (a prolificwriter of anti-Serb texts) introduction was enough for me to knowwhere this book was heading.
Customer Rating:
Summary: An important human testimony
Comment: This is the best of the Belgrade Internet diaries, by a Serbian feminist and peace activist who was at Belgrade ground zero during this very interesting and very unfortunate conflict.
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews:
|
The Diary of a Political Idiot is a woman writer’s story of life in Belgrade under NATO bombing. Labeled a traitor by nationalist Serbs because she opposes the war in Kosovo, Jasmina Tesanovic records the intimate details of ordinary life under extraordinary circumstances. Tesanovic’s Diary is remarkable because it chronicles recent history from an insider’s point of view rarely heard out of Milosevic’s Yugoslavia. As Tim Judah writes in his introduction, The Diary of a Political Idiot "shows us how ‘they’ could be ‘us’; what it feels like, what it is like to be trapped in a country isolated by its regime, where completely ordinary people pay for the crimes of their leaders." How Tesanovic’s diary entries found their way into print is a story of its own. Hours after NATO started bombing Yugoslavia, Jasmina Tesanovic received an e-mail from a friend in Sweden, who wanted to know how she was doing. Jasmina didn’t have time to write back, so she sent entries from her diary. Her friend, the writer Ana Valdes, posted Jasmina’s diary entries on the web site of a magazine she wrote for. Within a week, the diaries had been posted anonymously on fifty web sites, translated into several languages, and sent in emails throughout the world. Jasmina knew nothing of this. When a friend in London sent Jasmina an excerpt from the diary, she read a few paragraphs and thought, This woman writes exactly like me. Nevertheless, Tesanovic did not believe she was reading her own diary until her friend traced the e-mail from Sweden to Holland to Croatia and back to Jasmina. Someone had removed Jasmina’s name to protect her. The diary of an anonymous woman from Belgrade had become everybody’s diary. The Diary of a Political Idiot was chosen to represent the work of Serbian writers on the PEN Trans European Writer’s train. The Diary has now been translated into eleven languages. It first appeared in English in Granta (Issue 67) in 1999. A ruthless reviewer from Belgrade called The Diary of a Political Idiot "a book of the marginal for the marginal…the best book written this year, but it never will be mainstream in Serbia." Midnight Editions was created to preserve just such "marginal" voices which, as Tim Judah writes, are often lost "because of the enormity of crimes committed in their names." Jasmina’s Diary never made the news, the wire services, the major TV networks, or mainstream magazines, but it has found its way into the hands of astute editors and readers around the globe. At a time when "compassion fatigue" is seen as both the cause and the unavoidable consequence of current international news reporting, we believe that Jasmina Tesanovic’s wide readership is as much a testimony to the intelligence and compassion of her readers as it is to her own.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
