THE BALKAN EXPRESS: Fragments From the Other...

THE BALKAN EXPRESS: Fragments From the Other Side of War by Slavenka Drakulic (HarperPerennial: $11.; 165 pp.). A journalist of Croatian descent who lives in Zagreb, Drakulic recounts the experiences of individuals who have endured--and those who have perpetrated--the horrors racking former Yugoslavia. A young soldier recalls shooting someone for the first time; a student plots the disenfranchisement of a benefactor; an old friend becomes a refugee. Drakulic decries the perverse mentality that strips friends, lovers and neighbors of their individuality and reduces them to anonymous ethnic statistics: “The irrational that dwells in each of us is being unleashed from its chain and nobody can control it anymore . . . because the demons in us have already made people perceive themselves as nothing but parts of the national being. . . . If there is any future at all, I am afraid of the time to come.”