The Book of My Lives

Aleksandar Hemon's lives begin in Sarajevo, a small, blissful city where a young boy's life is consumed with street soccer with the neighborhood kids, resentment of his younger sister, and trips abroad with his engineer-cum-beekeeper father. Here, a young man's life is about poking at the pretension [...]
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Aleksandar Hemon's lives begin in Sarajevo, a small, blissful city where a young boy's life is consumed with street soccer with the neighborhood kids, resentment of his younger sister, and trips abroad with his engineer-cum-beekeeper father. Here, a young man's life is about poking at the pretensions of the city's elders with American music, bad poetry, and slightly better journalism. And then, his life in Chicago: watching from afar as war breaks out in Sarajevo and the city comes under siege, no way to return home; his parents and sister fleeing Sarajevo with the family dog, leaving behind all else they had ever known; and Hemon himself starting a new life, his own family, in this new city.And yet this is not really a memoir. "The Book of My Lives," Hemon's first book of nonfiction, defies""convention and expectation. It is a love song""to two different cities; it is a heartbreaking paean""to the bonds of family; it is a stirring exhortation to""go out and play soccer--and not for the exercise.""It is a book driven by passions but built on fierce""intelligence, devastating experience, and sharp insight.""And like the best narratives, it is a book that""will leave you a different reader--a different person, ""with a new way of looking at the world--when you've finished. For fans of Hemon's fiction, "The Book of My Lives "is simply indispensable; for the""uninitiated, it is the perfect introduction to one of the great writers of our time.""