"The Bosnia List," By Kenan Trebincevic And Susan Shapiro
My friend Susan Shapiro has co-authored Kenan Trebincevic's The Bosnia List: A Memoir of War, Exile, and Return, about his boyhood during the Bosnian War, and Janine Di Giovanni reviews it in The New York Times:

This book is a primer to a war as horrific as any in the 20th century. But it is also the details that make "The Bosnia List," which Trebincevic wrote with the journalist Susan Shapiro, acutely painful to read. Through a child's eyes, he witnesses his world slipping away, and he is brutally aware of what it is that he is losing: normality.

"The first sacrifice of war was her flowers," he writes of his mother. "We kept our shades closed to avoid being sprayed with bullets. Without sunlight, her cactus and hibiscus withered."

...The family finally -- with the help of sympathetic Serb neighbors -- crosses the border after several attempts. But they leave Bosnia with nothing. Left behind are their apartment, their baby photographs and their status. His father goes on to work at a fast-food restaurant in Connecticut. His mother watches news of the Dayton Accords, which ended the war in 1995, on CNN, baffled at the English version of what is happening to her country.

Even remembering old acquaintances back home doesn't provide Kenan with much solace. "All I could think was: Look what they'd taken away."

Two decades later, his mother dead, Trebincevic -- who is now a physical therapist in Queens -- makes the journey back to Brcko with his brother and their ailing, gentle father. On Kenan's arm is a tattoo of a medieval Bosnian flag, and in his pocket is a list of what he wants to do when they get there, which includes the names of those who betrayed the family. He plans to urinate on the grave of his karate teacher; he even thinks about how much water he will need to drink.

The stillborn rage he feels abates only when he realizes there were, in fact, kindly Serbs, who helped his family survive -- ordinary people who showed "flickers of goodness."