SOURCE: Drew, Bettina. “Broken Lives, Deadened Souls: Inside the Disintegrating Balkans.” Chicago Tribune Books (2 May 1993): 6.

In the following review, Drew praises Drakulic's portrayal of the effects of war on the individual in The Balkan Express.

These powerful essays [in The Balkan Express which are] about the war in the former Yugoslavia … should be required reading for … anyone concerned about the barbarity being practiced in the Balkans. Pictures of life amid “the most horrible thing a human being can experience,” they go beyond the numbing photographs and the political complexities that allow those distant from the conflict to turn the newspaper page.

“A war snaps your life in half,” writes Slavenka Drakulic, a Croatian journalist and novelist who recently has reported on the systematic mass rapes and deliberate impregnations of Muslim women in the name of “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia. “Yet you have to go on living as if...