The sources below concern the history of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the war and genocide, and its aftermath. They are available through the Cumberland County Library System, as the oral history project is about and for the Bosnian community in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. On another page you will find sources that are available in the Free Library of Philadelphia System, which is a nod to the Bosnian community in the United States and meant to represent a larger survey of sources that are theoretically available in major library systems nationwide.
The lists for Cumberland County and Philadelphia are each broken down by type of source and, if applicable, by topic. Each source type begins with those written for children and young adults, as educating the next generation is an integral part of the preservation of memory. Scholars are the next priority, and the organization of the sources reflects this goal: primary and nonfiction sources come before secondary and fiction sources. These are not recommendations, but rather a sample of some sources that might be available to you.
For wider accessibility, most of these sources can also be found on Amazon, through WorldCat, or your local bookstore or library. Books are often also in large print, audiobook, or eBook editions. To account for the availability of different editions, chapter page ranges are omitted. This list is not exhaustive, and we are always looking for suggestions!
* = Cumberland County and Philadelphia availability
CUMBERLAND COUNTY LIBRARY SYSTEM
Memoirs
Scott O’Grady with Michael French, Basher Five-Two: The True Story of F-16 Fighter Pilot Captain Scott O’Grady (New York: Doubleday, 1997).
- Middle grade nonfiction
*Amra Sabic-El-Rayess and Laura L. Sullivan, The Cat I Never Named: A True Story of Love, War, And Survival (New York: Bloombury Children’s Books, 2020).
- ages 13+ and grades 10-12
Kofi Annan with Nader Mousavizadeh, “Promises to Keep: Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and the Trials of Peacekeeping in a World of Civil War,” in Interventions: A Life in War and Peace (New York: Penguin Press, 2012).
*Zlata Filipović, Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo (New York: Viking, 1994).
*Eric Greitens, “Bosnia,” in The Heart and the Fist: The Education of a Humanitarian, The Making of a Navy SEAL (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011).
Nadja Halilbegovich, My Childhood Under Fire: A Sarajevo Diary (Tonawanda, NY: Kids Can Press, 2006).
*Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013).
- Memoir told through nonfiction pieces about Bosnian American writer’s childhood in Sarajevo and then (young) adult life in Chicago
*Clea Koff, The Bone Woman: A Forensic Anthropologist’s Search for Truth in The Mass Graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, And Kosovo (New York: Random House, 2004).
Jon Kerstetter, Crossings: A Doctor-Soldier’s Story (New York: Crown, 2017).
*Julia Lieblich and Esad Boskailo, Wounded I Am More Awake: Finding Meaning after Terror (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012).
- Boskailo is a Bosnian man who survived 6 concentration camps during the war
Scott O’Grady with Jeff Coplon, Return with Honor (New York: Doubleday, 1995).
*Kenan Trebinčević, The Bosnia List: A Memoir of War, Exile, and Return (New York: Penguin Books, 2014).
- Childhood in Brčko during war, resettlement in Westport, CT, return to Bosnia as an adult
Nonfiction Books
John Isaac and Keith Greenberg, Bosnia: A Civil War in Europe (Woodbridge, CT: Blackbirch Press, 1997).
- Picture book using UN photos and oral history of children during the war
Julian Borger, The Butcher’s Trail: How the Search for Balkan War Criminals Became the World’s Most Successful Manhunt (New York: Other Press, 2016).
- International Criminal Tribunal of the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY)
*Steven L. Burg & Paul S. Shoup, The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Ethnic Conflict and International Intervention (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe Inc., 1999).
- General audience
Leslie Fratkin, Sarajevo Self-Portrait: A View from the Inside (New York: Umbrage Editions, 2000).
- Traveling photography exhibition catalogue about Bosnian photographers during the war
Roy Gutman, A Witness to Genocide: The 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning Dispatches on the “Ethnic Cleansing” Of Bosnia (New York: Macmillan Publishers, 1993)
- Compilation of Gutman’s reporting in Bosnia
- Gutman controversial for truthfulness and bias
- These reports helped create visibility/mass outrage in US for war in Bosnia
*Michael Ignatieff, The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2017).
*Robert D. Kaplan, “From Bosnia to Baghdad,” in The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle against Fate (New York: Random House, 2012), 1-22.
*Christina Lamb, “The Roses of Sarajevo,” in Our Bodies, Their Battlefields: War Through the Lives of Women (New York: Scribner, 2020), 129-148.
- Chapter about the Siege of Sarajevo and rape as a weapon of war
Charles London, “” Surviving the Peace”: Coming of Age in Post-War Kosovo and Bosnia,” in One Day the Soldiers Came: Voices of Children in War (New York: HarperPerennial, 2007).
Selma Leydesdorff, Surviving the Bosnian Genocide: The Women of Srebrenica Speak, trans. Kay Richardson (Bloomberg, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011).
- Oral history based with some analysis and scholarly context
*Peter Maass, Love Thy Neighbor (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).
- Based on Maass’s reporting in Sarajevo and other places
David Bruce MacDonald, Balkan Holocausts?: Serbian and Croatian Victim-centred Propaganda and the War in Yugoslavia (New York: Palgrave, 2002).
- Academia
*Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History (New York: New York University Press, 1996).
- Written by a British journalist, history of Bosnia from “origins” to 1995
The Suitcase: Refugee Voices from Bosnia and Croatia, ed. Julie Mertus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
Norman M. Naimark, “Genocide in the Post-Cold War World,” in Genocide: A World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 123-141.
- Craig Nation, War in the Balkans 1991-2002 (Honolulu, HI: University Press of the Pacific, 2004).
- Dickinson College professor, written for the Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army War College about Bosnia and Kosovo
*George Packer, “Bosnia,” in Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019), 239-433.
- Biography about Holbrooke, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs 1994-1996, broker of Dayton Accords
*David Rieff, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).
- Rieff was a reporter in Bosnia and at the UN during the war
*David Rohde, Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica: Europe’s Worst Massacre Since World War II (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997).
- Rohde was a journalist for the Christian Science Monitor during the war and he was the first to find mass graves in Srebrenica
Chuck Sudetic, Blood and Vengeance: One Family’s Story of the War in Bosnia (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998).
- Srebrenica and surrounding villages
Reference
Kevin Blake, Bosnia and Herzegovina (Minneapolis, MN: Bearport Publishing, 2020).
- Ages 6-12, picture book
Umaima Mulla-Feroze and Matilda Gabrielpillai, Welcome to Bosnia and Herzegovina (Milwaukee, WI: Gareth Stevens Inc., 2002).
- Ages 6-12 picture book
*Carole Rogel, The Breakup of Yugoslavia and the War in Bosnia (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998).
- Reference guide for high school and college students
Alison Dolan and the editors of Family Tree Magazine, The Family Tree Historical Maps Book, Europe: A Country-by-Country Atlas of European History, 1700s-1900s (Cincinnati, Ohio: Family Tree Books, 2015).
Robert L. Maddox, Constitutions of the World (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2008).
Nikolina S. Uzicanin, Bosnian-English, English-Bosnian Dictionary (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1996).
Poetry
Allen Ginsberg, “Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina” in Collected Poems 1947-1997 (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006).
Azim Mujakic, Zivot Je Da Se Voli: Life is to Love (self-pub., 2018).
Ken Smith, Klaonica: Poems for Bosnia, eds. Ken Smith and Jodi Benson (Chester Springs, PA: Dufour Editions Inc., 1993).
- Klaonica = slaughterhouse
Fiction
*Carrie Arcos, We Are All That’s Left (New York: Philomel Books, 2018).
- Young adult historical fiction
*Kristen Levine, The Thing I’m Most Afraid Of (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2021).
- Grades 4-6, ages 10+
*John McCutcheon, Flowers for Sarajevo (Alanta, GA: Peachtree Publishers, 2017).
Kenan Trebinčević, World in Between: Based on a True Refugee Story (New York: Clarion Books, 2021).
- Middle grade autobiographical fiction
- See Bosnia List, Trebinčević’s memoir for adults
*Jesse Armstrong, Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals (New York: Blue Rider Press, 2016).
*Steven Galloway, The Cellist of Sarajevo (New York: Riverhead Books, 2008).
- Fictionalized account of Vedran Smailović, the “cellist of Sarajevo,” who was outraged by book’s liberties with his story
*Mark Greaney, One Minute Out (New York: Berkley Publishing, 2020).
*Mike Maden, Tom Clancy Line of Sight (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2018).
*Matthew Palmer, The Wolf of Sarajevo (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2016).
*Ismet Prcic, Shards (New York: Black Cat, 2011).
- Childhood in Tuzla, life in California
- Autobiographical fiction
- reading group guide at the end of the book
*Jonathan Rabb, The Book of Q: A Novel (New York: Crown Publishers, 2001).
*Katija Rudolph, Little Bastards in Spring: A Novel (Hanover, New Hampshire: Steerforth Press, 2015).
*Joe Sacco, The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo (San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 2003).
- Graphic novel
*Scott Turow, Testimony (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2017).
- Prosecution of a massacre of Roma people during the war in Bosnia
- Turow’s sources not published on his website
Films
*In the Land of Blood and Honey, directed by Angelina Jolie (2011, Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2012), DVD.
*The Whistleblower, directed by Larysa Kondracki (2011, Beverly Hills, CA: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2012), DVD.
- Based on the memoir The Whistleblower (appears on Philadelphia library list)
Welcome to Sarajevo, directed by Michael Winterbottom (1997, United States: Miramax and Echo Home Bridge Entertainment, 2011), DVD.
- Based on the novel Natasha’s Story by Michael Nicholson.
*Behind Enemy Lines, directed by John Moore (2001, United States: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2002), DVD.
- Based on the life of Scott O’Grady, pilot shot down over Bosnia during war, see his memoirs under “Memoirs”