Zlata's Diary

Eleven-year-old Zlata Filipovic describes her life in Sarajevo as the clouds of war build, advance and consume her city. The diary is a powerful and moving document and has been released in print and audio simultaneously. Dorota Puzio, a native of Poland, reads with a soft Eastern European accent and the emotional intensity that the diary requires. Her clear pronunciation helps the listener with unfamiliar names. She captures the growth Zlata experiences as she leaves her protected childhood behind and begins to live the day-to-day hardship and deprivation of a city under siege. Zlata's Diary is a poignant plea for peace and a testament to the futility and waste of war. This sensitive production allows the reader to hear a young girl who cries out for peace. L.R.S. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Starred review from January 31, 1994
A graphic firsthand look at the war in Sarajevo by a Croatian girl whose personal world has collapsed, this vivid, sensitive diary sounds an urgent and compelling appeal for peace. Filipovic begins her precocious journal in autumn 1991 as a contented 10-year-old preoccupied with piano and tennis lessons and saturated with American movies, TV shows, books and rock music. Soon the bombs start falling; her friends are killed by shrapnel or snipers' bullets; her family's country house burns down, and they subsist on UN food packages, without gas, electricity or water, as thousands of Sarajevans die. Filipovic, whose circle of friends included Serbs, Croats and Muslims, blames the former Yugoslavia's politicians for dividing ethnic groups and playing hell with people's lives. She and her parents escaped to Paris, and her diary, originally published in Croat by UNICEF, was reissued in France and has already been much written about in the U.S. Photos not seen by PW. 200,000 first printing; film rights to Universal; first serial to Newsweek; author tour

May 15, 1994
The harsh realities of the Bosnian conflict are brought to life in this chronicle. Begun in late 1991 when Zlata was ten, the typical musings of a young schoolgirl confiding in her diary are increasingly overtaken by accounts of the horrors of life in besieged Sarajevo. All vestiges of normal life disappear: schools close, electricity and gas are cut off, food and water become scarce, and Zlata becomes a virtual prisoner in the least vulnerable room of the family flat. As friends and family members are killed in the conflict, Zlata describes the events that have made her a "child without a childhood." This plea for help from an innocent victim is enhanced by the authentic Slavic voice of narrator Dorota Puzio. Recommended.-Linda Bredengerd, Hanley Lib., Univ. of Pittsburgh, Bradford, Pa.