A compassionate, visceral record of conflict; a brutally honest account of war's exhilarations and the more personal battleground of heroin addiction
Anthony Loyd is an award-winning foreign correspondent who has reported from numerous conflict zones including the Balkans, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Iraq and Chechnya. A former infantry officer, he left the British army after the First Gulf War and went to live in Bosnia, where he started reporting for The Times. My War Gone By, I Miss It So is his memoir of that conflict.
'Not since Michael Herr wrote Dispatches has any journalist written
so persuasively about violence and its seductions in all of war's
minutiae of awful detail... an account that demystifies war and the
war reporter and strips them bare before the reader' Peter
Beaumont, Observer
'An astonishing book... a raw, vivid and brutally honest account of
his transition from thrill seeker to concerned reporter' Philip
Jacobson, Daily Mail
'An extraordinary memoir of the Bosnian War... savage and
mercilessly readable... deserves a place alongside George Orwell,
James Cameron and Nicholas Tomalin. It is as good as war reporting
gets. I have nowhere read a more vivid account of frontline fear
and survival. Forget the strategic overview. All war is local. It
is about the ditch in which the soldier crouches and the ground on
which he fights and maybe dies. The same applies to the war
reporter. Anthony Loyd has been there and knows it' Martin Bell,
The Times
'A truly exceptional book, one of those rare moments in
journalistic writing when you can sit back and realise that you are
in the presence of somebody willing to take the supreme risk for a
writer, of extending their inner self. I finished reading Anthony
Loyd's account of his time in the Balkans and Chechnya only a few
days ago and am still feeling the after-effects ... I read his
story of war and addiction (to conflict and heroin) with a sense of
gratitude for the honesty and courage on every page' Fergal Keane,
Independent
'Undoubtedly the most powerful and immediate book to emerge from
the Balkan horror of ethnic civil war... far more revealing and
convincing than anything recounted to camera by visiting
journalists and politicians' Antony Beevor, Daily Telegraph
'A brutal yet sensitive story which addresses both the nature of
addiction and the experience of war. I was struck by Anthony's work
and words, experiences, and for me his is an important voice and an
important book' Tom Hardy
'Chilling... a true picture into the brutality of war and should be
required reading for all those politicians who use phrases such as
"collateral damage" and "surgical strikes"' John Nichol, Daily
Express
'Both beautiful and disturbing' Wall Street Journal
'Part war memoir, part coming-of-age tale and part junkie diary,
it's a raw account of the hypnotic lures of violence, heroin and
danger' Carla Power, Newsweek
'Battlefield reportage does not get more up close, gruesome, and
personal... The fear and confusion of battle are so vivid that in
places, they rise like acrid smoke from the page' New York
Times
'Magnificent... a stench of blood, excrement, mortar-fire,
slivovitz and human bestiality emanates from these pages' Ben
Shephard, Literary Review
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