My War Gone By, I Miss It So
by Anthony Loyd

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Book Reviews of My War Gone By, I Miss It So

Book Review: A face from the other side of the mirror
Summary: 5 Stars

Few war correspondents of any age have been as devoid of a sense of calling as Anthony Loyd. In 1992 he went to Sarajevo with a diploma in photography as his "cover" and an adolescent's fascination with war as his real motivation. If he went there to find himself, he succeeded. He lost himself as well.

A cameraman friend of mine remembers Anthony Loyd in Bosnia as friendly, modest and generous. These qualities might have driven an entirely worthy account of the Yugoslav wars. But it is Loyd's other side, his darkness, that makes this such an extraordinary and essential account. Prostitute the values of home, he writes, and "your wisdom multiplies". He hangs with crims and victims, romantics and murderers. In time his ignorance and cynicism metamorphisises to awareness, to rage, to disillusionment, and ultimately to his own dark clarity.

This is a helluva book about war, and of the high price of the knowledge of it.. It looks unflinchingly at atrocity, at notions of courage and idealism, at the instinct to attend wars that are none of your business, and the other instinct of powerful nations to avoid wars that should be their business.

It gives a belly-up view not only of the Bosnian conflict in all its varied guises, but of Chechnya as well. Loyd, inevitably, becomes a casualty himself. The sane man's response to such things is to act in an insane way. Heroin does it nicely.

Give this man a mug of sljivovica and a pillow for his head. The prices he has paid are his, but he has written a roiling, shrapnel-blasted cracker of a book that renders most everything else in the genre pale: a terrifying, compelling, inverse morality tale. It is indecent that awfulness on such a scale should read so well.

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