My War Gone By, I Miss It So - Anthony Loyd Audiobook

Written by Anthony Loyd
Read by Steven Crossley
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
Release date: September 17, 2015
Duration: 11:48:52

A “beautiful and disturbing” account of the Bosnian conflict by a war correspondent grappling with addiction and a family legacy of military heroism (The Wall Street Journal).

Publishers Weekly…. Starred review from January 3, 2000
“It was not necessarily that I had `found myself’ during the war, but the conflict had certainly put a kind of buffer zone between the fault lines in my head.” 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.

Loyd, a veteran of the Persian Gulf War (where he was a platoon commander), was deep into suicidal depression and heavy drinking when, at 26, he left London for war-torn Bosnia in 1993 (he got assignments for British newspapers and is now a Times of London correspondent). After returning to England in 1995 by way of Chechnya, he sank into heroin addiction before pulling himself together and returning to cover the Balkan carnage through 1996. He admits to a grim fascination with war as the ultimate frontier of human experience.

Just when a reader begins to feel that Loyd is too cynical and detached, a scorchingly lyrical passage will illuminate the Balkan war in all its anarchic horror. While Loyd finds plenty of guilt all around, he is highly sympathetic to the Bosnian Muslims, approves of NATO’s bombing of the Serbs and chastises U.N. troops for standing idly by while thousands of Muslims were slaughtered in Srebrenica, a designated U.N. “safe area.” On the autobiographical front, he attributes his immersion in war to his hostile relationship with his intimidating father, and to his family’s complex web of national and ethnic origins (Austrian, English, Belgian, Egyptian, Jewish). 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.”

British actor Steven Crossley masterfully conjures up the sights, smells, and sounds of a country being torn apart. Althought AudioFile is critical of the author…“The British Crossley skillfully portrays the author, a mercenary photojournalist in the Balkan War, who is preoccupied with taking narcotics, rather than pictures. Listening to this first-person account, the listener thrashes around in time and place, being fed fact and fiction in a rambling mixture. The reader adroitly conveys the atrocities of war. In a nutshell, we have a confusing account of a confusing war written by a confused author, who relies on heroin for inspiration and “f___ing” as a favorite adjective. Without a doubt, Steven Crossley saves the book.” AudioFile 2001