Sunflowers In The Sand: Stories From Children Of War is the story of war in present day Europe and its poignant and heart-wrenching effects and influences on children caught in the horror of conflict. Illustrated by the artwork of Croatian children, Leah Curtin's informative, engaging, powerful text is a vivid expression of the experience of children in the Balkan conflict telling with a compelling candor what it is like for a child to be trapped in an incomprehensible world of adult hatred, conflict, and horror. Ultimately, Sunflowers In The Sand is a testament to the endurance and resilience of these children who survived the loss of home, family, and their own childhood -- all sacrificed on the altar of war created by political and military leaders in the name philosophies, ideologies, and ethnic hatreds. Highly recommended.

In her heart breaking account of the impact of the Balkan war on children, author Leah Curtin quotes Darija - a thirteen year old survivor living outside the town of Biograd:

"War is nothing like I thought it would be...Tell the children of America that I hope for them, they never learn what war is. It is to be so afraid that you cannot sleep even when there are no bombs. It is to see everything, everything destroyed. I cannot speak of those who are dead ...my heart is still in bandages."

Ms. Curtin - with the help of Patricija Padelin, child psychologist at the hospital in Zadar - chronicles the almost unspeakable violence the children suffered during the course of the war, along with their fears, hopes, dreams and enormous capacity for survival.

In the face of complicated mourning - in one of the stories a boy recounts how he had to choose between betraying his father or grandfather - the children are encouraged to speak about their experiences and to draw and paint images based on how they feel. Some of the illustrations were drawn in refugee camps during and after the war; others during interviews with the children to help them express their experiences.

The result is a moving and illuminating chronicle of the inner lives of children who have been victims of war.

Just as war is the enemy of art, so art is the antidote for war. As the poet Jane Kenyon has said, "We cannot afford to ignore our inner lives, our imaginations, for when we do, we become capable of extreme cruelty and destruction. Tenderness toward existence is what we lose when we lose art."

Ms. Curtin, with the assistance of Ms. Padelin, has taken us into the inferno of war and found, miraculously, war's primary victims taking off the bandages and making narrative and visual art. Ms. Curtin's narrative is interwoven with the children's voices and with their remarkable drawings. Upon being asked to tell his story, a boy named Davor declares "I am as normal as anyone else. It's the world that's crazy, not me." What artist has not felt a similar need to declare him or herself sane!

The most haunting images are perhaps the ones of hearts. In one heart colored orange, there are teeth within the heart and a world outside it where a child is raising her arms to a sky without bombs. In another picture, there is a mouth with a twisted smile that appears to have stitches for lips. Under two dancing hearts the caption reads: "Usually when a child draws hearts, the larger the heart, the more he is in need of love."

My favorite painting is reproduced on the cover of the book: a beautiful blue dove, its wings outstretched, an olive branch in its beak. The bird is flying through the war torn countryside where there are still sunflowers lifting their yellow heads to the sky. But if the viewer looks closely, there is a skull with an open mouth, and just above that image of death there are the instruments of war. This painting was a large mural made collaboratively by fifteen Croatian children who wrote peace messages on the back.

I thought of Picasso's GUERNICA, of course, and along with it the temptation to despair, which any honest depiction of the madness of modern war brings us.

The final and most important achievement of SUNFLOWERS IN THE SAND is Leah Curtin's refusal to embrace hopelessness. By letting the children speak, by empowering them to show through art their own inner lives and resilient spirits, she has in her own unforgettable words instructed us to follow them "and there will be hope for the world."

In her heart breaking account of the impact of the Balkan war on children, author Leah Curtin quotes Darija - a thirteen year old survivor living outside the town of Biograd:

"War is nothing like I thought it would be...Tell the children of America that I hope for them, they never learn what war is. It is to be so afraid that you cannot sleep even when there are no bombs. It is to see everything, everything destroyed. I cannot speak of those who are dead...my heart is still in bandages."

Ms. Curtin - with the help of Patricija Padelin, child psychologist at the hospital in Zadar - chronicles the almost unspeakable violence the children suffered during the course of the war, along with their fears, hopes, dreams and enormous capacity for survival.

In the face of complicated mourning - in one of the stories a boy recounts how he had to choose between betraying his father or grandfather - the children are encouraged to speak about their experiences and to draw and paint images based on how they feel. Some of the illustrations were drawn in refugee camps during and after the war; others during interviews with the children to help them express their experiences.

The result is a moving and illuminating chronicle of the inner lives of children who have been victims of war.

The atrocities inflicted upon civilians - the most vulnerable targets of modern warfare - are nearly unspeakable. The rape of women in Croatia during the course of the conflict has been extensively documented and made public.

Less well known is the sexual savagery directed toward infants, and the brutal torture to which the old were subjected. I hesitate to repeat one child's account of what he witnessed in a church: elderly people tied to pews, begging to be killed, while soldiers cut out their eyes and forced these innocent people to swallow them.

How does one ever forgive such atrocities? Ms. Curtin - a nurse and widely published health ethicist - offers no simple, unrealistic answer. It may not be possible, at least not in these children's lifetimes.

How do children heal then? How do they overcome the impulse to hate not only the soldiers who did these things, but their own neighbors who may carry the burden of the enemy's ethnic identity?

One of the many virtues of Ms. Curtin's book is her insistent answer: the inner, creative life of the children and the need for adults to honor it, to learn from it, to be changed by it.

Just as war is the enemy of art, so art is the antidote for war. As the poet Jane Kenyon has said, "We cannot afford to ignore our inner lives, our imaginations, for when we do, we become capable of extreme cruelty and destruction. Tenderness toward existence is what we lose when we lose art."

Ms. Curtin, with the assistance of Ms. Padelin, has taken us into the inferno of war and found, miraculously, war's primary victims taking off the bandages and making narrative and visual art. Ms. Curtin's narrative is interwoven with the children's voices and with their remarkable drawings. Upon being asked to tell his story, a boy named Davor declares "I am as normal as anyone else. It's the world that's crazy, not me." What artist has not felt a similar need to declare him or herself sane!

In one revealing example painted by a child refugee from Zagreb, a boy's face is surrounded by an exploding city. Drawn in the form of a pastiche, it is impossible to separate the head in the drawing from the bombed landscape surrounding it. The boy's eyes are not the eyes of a child, but of one who has been forced to grow up too fast.

A boy named Hrovje, whose skull had been badly damaged by a grenade while he was rocked to sleep by his grandmother, has had his story juxtaposed with another child's portrait of a woman holding an infant. The anguished face of the woman is reminiscent of the haunted faces painted by the Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch.

Some of the stories and illustrations leave a lighter, almost whimsical impression. Kristina dreams of being a dancer in Hawaii and hopes that one day she will appear on the American TV program Hawaii Five O. She seems to be perfectly represented in a drawing made by another child recuperating in intensive care at the hospital in Zadar. A hula dancer with a bright red dress and bouffant hairdo seems a long way from these children's scarred childhoods.

The most haunting images are perhaps the ones of hearts. In one heart colored orange, there are teeth within the heart and a world outside it where a child is raising her arms to a sky without bombs. In another picture, there is a mouth with a twisted smile that appears to have stitches for lips. Under two dancing hearts the caption reads: "Usually when a child draws hearts, the larger the heart, the more he is in need of love."

My favorite painting is reproduced on the cover of the book: a beautiful blue dove, its wings outstretched, an olive branch in its beak. The bird is flying through the war torn countryside where there are still sunflowers lifting their yellow heads to the sky. But if the viewer looks closely, there is a skull with an open mouth, and just above that image of death there are the instruments of war. This painting was a large mural made collaboratively by fifteen Croatian children who wrote peace messages on the back.

I thought of Picasso's GUERNICA, of course, and along with it the temptation to despair, which any honest depiction of the madness of modern war brings us.

The final and most important achievement of SUNFLOWERS IN THE SAND is Leah Curtin's refusal to embrace hopelessness. By letting the children speak, by empowering them to show through art their own inner lives and resilient spirits, she has in her own unforgettable words instructed us to follow them "and there will be hope for the world."

Very well written and compelling to read, historic and straight-forward. The documentation is amazing. In fact, that is what about half the book is. I was lucky enough to find this, though it was written back in about 1969.

As my heading suggest, the largest postwar massacre in Europe is probably this event, rather than exclusively Srebrenica, as stated on the cover of David Rohde's excellent book "Endgame", but at the same time, this is close to being a World War II era event. I still believe this is a point of contention. Another interesting aspect of this book, is that it was written during high tensions of the cold war. Out of Print? They need to reprint it.

I only wish that more people can hear of the atrocities commited against hundreds of thousands of children, women and elderly men by Tito's Partisan troops post WWII. The Croats have been long demonized by the Serbs by their Communistic whitewashing of history. Now for the first time, light is shed on the massacres at Bleiburg and the Croatian Way of the Cross across the whole of Yugoslavia.

A simply enlightening piece of work! Thank you for carrying this book.

There is finally an account of what happened to the Croatians after WWII. After hearing about the crimes of Jasenovac for years, the crimes perpetrated against the Croatian people have come to light.

The times of silence are over. Even whispering about the events at Bleiburg and the Way fo the Cross during Tito's reign were answered with severe punishment.

Thank you for carrying such a revealing piece of literature. There may be some rest for the victims after this.

Dubravka Ugresic is perhaps less well-known in the English-speaking world than the other Croatian "dissident" writer Slavenka Drakulic, which is unfortunate. Both Ugresic's essays and especially fiction are far superior to that of Drakulic. "Culture of Lies" includes the author's observations of Croatian society and politics of the last ten years, both of which have been none too kind to her (indeed, while achieving great acclaim in other European countries, she was branded a "traitor" and worse by Croatian politicians and the pro-regime press for her uncompromising criticism of Croatian nationalism, etc.). In this book, Ugresic shows the many ways in which nationalism imbued all levels of society in Croatia, making people increasingly hostile to different views and people who were/are "different." Her particular area of interest is the way this was reflected in the behavior of intellectuals, who-at least one would like to think-are not supposed to be as susceptible to the appeal of God-and-country patriotism and nationalistic kitsch. Her description of an incident in a Zagreb tram, in which a young man accosts and beats an old destitute drunken man, is particularly vivid and sadly indicative. In fact, this whole section of the book, called "Souvenirs from Paradise" is an excellent collection of impressions and observations of the underside of Croatian life. Despite the recent sweeping political changes in Croatia, many of the negative aspects of society in this country as described by Ugresic are still here, and they will haunt this country for some time to come.

It tells truth of thousends of people manipulated with mass media on Balkans. If you want an expert book on how wars started in ex-yugoslavia you should read this one.

Although it has taken the English translation of this collection of essays a few years to come into print (it was first published in Dutch),this is a highly relevant, illuminating, and moving book. Most of the essays were written between '92 and '94, with more recent postscripts. With rare clarity and complexity of thought, gift of articulation, emotional courage and absence of pretence or squeamishness, Ugresic has carried out a highly accessible investigation into the Yugoslav war, the demise of communist Europe, the East-West polarity, the ambiguities of exile. With references to other East European writers and thinkers (Milan Kundera, Miroslav Krleja, Danilo Kis, Josiph Brodsky), she explores the tyranny of the new constructs of national identity in the Balkan states, the enforced collective amnesia of the former Yugoslavs, the many traumas of their history, as well as the common psycho-cultural lanscape of the 'Eastern block'. There are many deeply moving episodes and revealing insights here, delivered in the familiar 'Central European' style of ironic, melancholic, bitter humanism. Vaguely reminiscent of Milan Kundera, only better because of the lack of smugness and the final doubting humility of someone who has felt intense pain and articulated the nature of this pain.

What a horrible life these people had to have in Yugoslavia, struggling for their life under Tito's communist killers.

The book shows the view of one of the creators of the Macedonian alphabet, who was sentenced to 5 years in the concentration camp Goli Otok (Naked Island) in Yugoslavia between 1956-1961. It gives dark but truthful description of the conditions in which the POLITICAL prisoners were held. A book one must read before visiting ex-Yugoslavia

a fascinating book which deals with the suffering croatians faced during Tito's regime, a subject few contemporary writers approach. an insight into the heart of communist darkness.

This is a great book about people who help childrens in countries which dont have possibilities for high-tech medicine. Also this book have a wonderful descriptions of my country (people, situation, cities...).

This book is marvellous diary about people who help to childrens all over the world. Also have a good descriptions of my state: (general situation, war, cities, people...). I hope that next edition will have more successful stories. Thanks! :-)

You feel a part of each patients family, their sorrows and their joys. You see the inside of each sternum.

Croatia: Travels In Undiscovered Country by Tony Fabijancic is a superbly written, personal memoir and eye-witness travelogue of what it was like to experience the land and people of Croatia as both an ancestral home and an undiscovered country. Transporting the reader on one man's journey into a rich and varied landscape, Croatia: Travels In Undiscovered Country is a vividly written, deftly informative, and memorably presented experience of a land steeped in centuries of tradition and lore. Croatia: Travels In Undiscovered Country is especially recommended reading for armchair travelogue adventure enthusiasts and anyone thinking of a trip to Croatia for themselves.

A terrific book. I have found no other book on Croatia that offers such insight into the country's current way of life and historical emblems, without becoming trite or resorting solely to political fact listing. Reveals the fragile beauty of a an undiscovered country in the midst of economic and cultural change. A wonderful travel book. Accessible and imaginative writing. Very well done.

Who are refugees? People who fled the wars in Bosnia and Croatia are scattered in Missouri and Ontario, Germany and Austria, Israel and Pakistan, and they are displaced to other towns within their own countries. They are not voluntary emigrants whose bags are packed with hopes in search of a dream. They may be wealthy, or at least they may once have been. The refugee cleaning floors for minimum wage may have been a surgeon in her own life. The eight-year old girl may be the only one in her family who has learned English, so it is only she who can speak with government officials and store clerks. Refugees are anyone and everyone. They are professionals and farmers and little boys and criminals and poets, but mostly they are women and children and the elderly.

The Suitcase gives voice to the people "without context". They speak of their dreams and their losses. Their poems are here and sad scenes of small things washed away forever by tides of war. "War taught us a lot. How the fear makes people irrationally greedy. It is difficult to resist becoming greedy. It is almost like an instinct. To possess, to hold on to something. In shelters, to hold on to somebody. To hold on to your prayer, even if you never prayed before". Some refugees long only for the day when they can return to their hometowns to begin to reglue the shards of their old lives. Some can speak only of Bosnia's beauty or the pleasures of a cup of coffee with friends.

Others close and lock the door on the past with determination. "We arrived here safely. Everyone is fine. Please do not write us or try to contact us. We do not want to be reminded of anything", reads the postcard sent by a Bosnian family after they arrived in Canada in 1994.

The book is well-edited and well-organized along five broad themes. These are followed by three powerful afterwords, of which Dubravka Ugresic's is the strongest as she muses on the fact that the people of the Balkans are one people. Divided by the same language, they look alike, and yet "not one generation in the Balkans manages to escape war, in every family there is at least one killer and one killed, new life only begins on somebody else's dead head." There is one minor error (p.11, Vukovar was attacked in 1991, not 1992).

The Suitcase rings powerfully and true. The simple message here is that refugees are people, and the lives they lead are but a shot away for us all.

The Suitcase is a wonderful and sorrowful journey into the hearts of an oppressed and victimized land. the personal stories are of those who, throughout history have had no voice. Any person with a sense of history will surely feel the magnitude of the plight of a refugee.

I'm not a historian, but I love reading books on obscure bits of history. Generally they disappoint: either they're so popularized that I find myself unable to trust a word that they say (lack of footnotes generally makes it worse!) or so academic that they're impossible to understand (at least without having read another book on the subject first-- or several dozen). "Age, Marriage, and Politics" did not disappoint.

Rheubottom's primary background appears to be in anthropology, and it shows. He uses case studies; he looks at dowries; he makes genealogical charts using triangles and circles for boys and girls. He explains thoroughly enough that even I can understand the ideas, and he seems to be aiming the book at people who (like me) know nothing about Ragusa and very little about how similar city-states might have worked, since he goes into detail about various social structures rather than saying, say, "the Ragusan court system differed from the Venetian only on the following points." He provides all the little details that make me so happy when I'm reading a history book. (Yes, I do this for fun.)

Obviously, at this price you're not going to be buying it for fun. Look for it in the library when you've exhausted the potential of the fiction section. If you're anything like me you'll enjoy it.

The post-war president of the American Association of Jews, Louis Breier said of Stepinac: "This great man of the Church is charged with collaboration with the Nazis. We as Jews condemn openly this mockery. He was one of those few men in Europe who stood against tyrrany of Nazism even when the danger was greatest." As in many other Communist countries Stepinac endured a Serbo-Yugoslav show-trial and attempts were made to sully his name. But little can destroy the image of this great defender of human rights. As children growing up in the Sixties in Canada my friend's mom's junior class prayed for Stepinac's safety during the reign of terror in Communist Yugoslavia. This book is an easy, well-documented read for the junior Stepinac reader

This readable and well researched study of the Serbian community in Croatia sheds bright light on the political, ethic, and regional rivalries that endure in the tragedy of modern Yugoslavia.