Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #669830 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-08
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Observer
"The articles published in War Zones bear witness to both the
development of military power and its deployment... excellent...
arresting..."

Independent
"Offers up some real gems"

Sunday Times
"Searing ... haunting ... chilling"

Customer Reviews

Bombing, bullies and meeting one's father
Although there are only four pieces in this edition that I think outstanding, most of the others are also reasonably good. Only one is, I feel, inferior to the high standards this publication usually attains - a flippantly self-indulgent piece about having an abortion: The Bastard of Kabul by Elif Shafak. The most frightening and affecting writing is from Marione Ingram - an account of when her mother and herself as a child were caught in the fire-storm bombing of Hamburg. This is a terrifyingly vivid piece of writing.

Other notable work included here is a short story by John Burnside called The Lime Room which chillingly demonstrates how to get your own back on a schoolyard bully. Brian Thompson's short piece on National Service in the 1950s is both lively and hugely entertaining, and A M Homes's contribution on the perils of meeting one's birth father, managed to be both very sad and acidly funny.

Granta's decision to let the writers decide on their own definition of "war" is a good one. Most of those which approached the subject obliquely were better than the usual journalistic battle-scene accounts of blood and mayhem. Smaller and quieter wars are taking place everywhere, not just on battlefields. Even so, I thought "Struggle" might have been a more accurate, if slightly more anodyne, title for some of these contributions.