Blood on My Hands
Craig Jurisevic with Robert Hillman
Listed in the 2011 Better Reading’s ’50 Books You Can’t Put Down’
The year is 1999, and a fresh hell is being created before our eyes. It is hardly to be credited that the enlightened nations of Europe are allowing this nightmare to occur only sixty minutes by jet from Paris and London. The forces of Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic have swept into Kosovo on the Balkan Peninsula leaving a trail of death and heartbreak. Scenes of Milosevic’s ‘ethnic cleansing’ play out on television screens all over the world; haunted figures huddled behind barbed wire fences, bodies heaped in ditches.
Adelaide surgeon Craig Jurisevic recalls his grandfather’s ordeal in a Nazi concentration camp and resolves to honour his memory by offering his skills as a surgeon to the victims of the conflict. Leaving behind a wife and son, Jurisevic flies to the Balkans under the auspices of the International Medical Corps. Struggling to maintain his moral bearings, Jurisevic’s journey from Adelaide to the hell of Kosovo has become a descent into the heart of darkness. Blood on My Hands, co-written with award-winning author Robert Hillman, tells a story of terrible suffering, of extraordinary heroism, and of the savagery that lies coiled in the human heart.
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2010 | 9780980757002350 | Paperback | 235 x 150mm | 0.46kg
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Memoirs, Biography, Genocide & ethnic cleansing, armed conflict, Craig Jurisevic, Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, Balkan Peninsula, surgeon, battlefield, Kosovo War, the Balkans, Kosovo Liberation Army
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Jurisevic's journey from Adelaide to the hell of Kosovo has become a descent into the heart of darkness. Blood on My Hands tells a story of terrible suffering, of extraordinary heroism, and of the savagery that lies coiled in the human heart.
“This is an extremely well written book, but not one that is just to be enjoyed – it is brutal and honest; shocking but authentic. There is no other like it.”
Craig Jurisevic was born in Adelaide, South Australia in 1965 and is married with three children. He is a cardiothoracic and trauma surgeon and has worked in many conflict zones.
Robert Hillman is a Melbourne-based writer of over 60 works of fiction and non-fiction. His autobiography, The Boy in the Green Suit, won the Australian National Biography Award for 2005.