THE IMPOSSIBLE COUNTRY
Brian Hall spent the spring and summer of 1991 traveling through Yugoslavia, even as the nation was crumbling in his footsteps. Having arrived a week after the catalytic May 2 massacre at Borovo Selo, he watched as political solutions were abandoned with dizzying speed and Yugoslavia’s various ethnicities tipped into the violence of civil war.
One of the last foreigners to travel unhindered through the region, Hall has captured the voices of both the prominent and the unknown, from Serbian demagogue Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian leader Alija Izetbegovic to everyday Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. At the same time, he provides indispensable historical background, showing how the country called Yugoslavia was cobbled together after World War I, tracing the “ethnic cleansing” practices that have marked the area for centuries, and explaining why every attempt at political compromise has met with such suspicion and resistance.
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Praise for The Impossible Country
“The most moving book on former Yugoslavia that I have read. [Hall] never lapses into didacticism or value judgments about Balkan predilections for blood-feuds. Instead he listens, describes, and takes stock of what he has seen and heard.”
—The Times (London)
“A tragic portrait . . . presented with sympathy and frequently with humor . . . [of] a disparate people who were never united except by their resentment of a foreign conqueror.”
—The Atlantic
“Intelligent, witty, and full of precious details . . . A guide to the minds of the peoples of what was once Yugoslavia.”
—The New York Times
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