cover image THEN THEY STARTED SHOOTING: Growing Up in Wartime Bosnia

THEN THEY STARTED SHOOTING: Growing Up in Wartime Bosnia

Lynne Jones, . . Harvard Univ., $27.95 (352pp) ISBN 978-0-674-01561-6

Unlike other adolescents who grew up in war-torn environments, the teenage subjects of child psychiatrist Jones, caught in the crossfire of the Bosnian war of the 1990s, are now more concerned with their personal futures than the memories of war, even though many endured four years of shelling and siege. In this absorbing study, Jones finds that Bosnian children who distanced themselves from the war felt psychologically more comfortable than those who tried to make sense of things—a finding that Jones attributes in part to their lack of direct participation in the conflict. In contrast to years of low-intensity conflicts witnessed by Palestinian and South African kids, she concludes, the war in Bosnia was a "prolonged high-intensity conflict in which children had little opportunity for active participation except in sharing the tasks of basic survival." It is sometimes challenging to keep track of the children's names and story lines (she uses only first-name pseudonyms) through interviews from 1996 and 2003, and anyone looking for a comprehensive history of the war won't find it here, but the book offers new insights into Bosnian Serb–Muslim relations through the eyes of children and addresses perennial issues of war, trauma and prejudice. (Jan.)