[In the following review, Willens praises Drakulic's combination of narrative and journalism to describe the war in The Balkan Express.]

Croat and Serb, Zagreb and Belgrade, Milosovic and Tudjman—newspapers and TV bombard us with new names as the former Yugoslavia collapses in gunfire and blood. The Balkan Express, by Slavenka Drakulic explains how this latest war in Europe feels from the inside, how it eats away the inner life: “The war is like a monster … it grabs you by the throat … overtakes the inner self until one can scarcely recognize oneself any longer.” These 18 personal essays dramatize that terrible transformation.

At first, when the war begins to take shape, Drakulic comments philosophically about why her country has gone mad: “This society never had a proper chance to become a society not of oppressed peoples, but of citizens, of self-aware individuals with developed democratic institutions within which to work out differences, conflicts and changes, instead of by war. … War therefore came upon us like some sort of natural calamity, like a plague or a flood, inevitable, our destiny.”

War brings the terrifying division between Serb and Croat, neighbor and neighbor, husband and wife. Demagogues fuel the hatreds. Unforgivable bombings, sieges, rapes force everyone to choose sides. Later, Drakulic notes the war mentality: her neighbors hoard, her daughter leaves for Canada with a stuffed animal from childhood in her suitcase, bombs begin to fall.

Still later in its awful progress, the war destroys sanity. Oppositions congeal; anyone who questions them is a traitor. The essay “An Actress Who Lost Her Homeland” traces the exile of one celebrity who refuses to accept the conflict. Finally come the refugees who need care when the war has exhausted those who should give it: “We are the war; we carry in us the mortal illness that is slowly reducing us to what we never thought possible.”

By offering us her personal account of the Balkan war, Drakulic drops conventional journalism for a more appropriate form, half story and half essay. She keeps her journalist's eye trained on telling details, however: a refugee longs for frivolous high-heeled shoes, the Croatian president snubs a group of protesters, a church clock topples from its bombed tower, a teenage soldier becomes a practiced killer. She also records as honestly as possible the changes in her own feelings as the mythical monster of war enters and deforms her inner being.