"I found Hicks's book engaging, provocative, well researched, and incredibly useful. His sense of history is both deeply informed and extremely nuanced. . . . He is quite adept at choosing exemplary moments or texts to concisely and efficiently illustrate complex arguments. . . . This is a book whose claims and arguments deserve attention."--Ammiel Alcalay, author of After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture

"Hicks notes that in a democracy, 'we are each responsible for policy decisions taken on our behalf. So it is imperative that we gain fluency in the diverse forms of representation . . . that bring war to us.' Lessons from Sarajevo is illustrated with a wealth of images, from seminal photographs of corpses on Civil War battlefields to newsmagazine covers from the 1990s of emaciated prisoners in Bosnia."--Daily Hampshire Gazette

"Hicks is here using 'grammar' in a structural sense, as a way to look at the underlying epistemological structures that informs modern approaches to understanding the organized violence known as warfare. . . . It is worth noting that the author has been teaching a class on war stories for ten years, and his approach to teaching the subject material is clearly the basis for this volume. Recommended."--Choice

"In this powerful book, Jim Hicks explores a collection of narratives about the experience of war in many genres and a wide range of media that eschew the sentimental."--The Arts Fuse

"I just finished Jim Hicks's Lessons from Sarajevo--a very deft critique of the 'war story, ' and so glad that it's out there, deconstructing the ossified positions of observer, victim, and aggressor. I feel I've found a comrade in prose, in an area that deserves more thinking, more feeling, more work. . . . Thanks, Jim!"--Philip Metres, author of Abu Ghraib Arias