The Bosnia List is a memoir written by Kenan Trebincevic in collaboration with Susan Shapiro. Kenan lived with his family in Bosnia during the Balkan wars. He wrote this book as a memoir of his experiences, and to make the extremity of the Balkan wars better known. Also, Kenan honors his late mother in writing The Bosnia List. He remembers that she used to sit at the typewriter and write about their struggles and hardships.
The time period jumps back and forth between the life of Kenan at age 9 in 1992 during the Balkan Wars, and his life in America at age 30 more than twenty years later. The description of Kenan’s life in Bosnia shows the great suffering he and his family went through, as well as the suffering of other Muslims in the area. When …show more content…
I now understand the hostility in the middle-eastern countries, and why there is tension between different religions. The politics in this time were shaky, and the ideas presented in this book stressed the importance of a strong government that can keep the country in order and not allow such atrocities. I also have a better understanding of the conflict after reading The Bosnia List. I had no knowledge of the tremendous suffering people went through at this time. Honestly, all of the history I learned through the reading of this book was new for me. A lot of people are not fully informed on the events that took place during the Balkan Wars. These events can be directly compared to the genocide of Jews during World War II. People were devastated for the Jews after World War II, but hardly anyone showed sympathy for the Muslims after the Balkan Wars, even though they are directly comparable. This is portrayed in the following quote from the book: “Then Slobodan Milosevic came to power in 1989 and mobilized Serb nationalists in a deranged campaign to wipe Muslims out for the sake of ‘Greater Serbia,’ the way Hitler had envisioned an Aryan race.” (page