Book Review- "The Cellist of Sarajevo" -Steven Galloway

How do you stay human in the midst of the violence and depravity of war? Galloway sketches four characters, each making a choice to face death rather than yield completely to the forces besieging Sarajevo from without, and within.

Arrow, a young sharpshooter trained at the university club, risks her life to protect the cellist, who for 22 days plays an adagio at the site of a bombing that took 22 lives. Kenan, an accountant, risks his life crossing a bridge to bring water to his family and an elderly neighbor. Dragan enters the zone of attack to find bread for his sister’s family. And the cellist plays on, knowing he is an easy target to the enemy who launched the bomb, knowing too that his music can heal not only his soul, but those of the people who listen. Not all life in Sarajevo yields to the force of gunfire/

Each character faces the human fate: will you simply flow with the forces that seem to control life about you? Or will you act out of a vision of what it means to be deeply human, to affirm life, beauty and community?

And each reader, living in far less threatening circumstances than the characters of this book, faces the same questions: What is it to be human? And how will you act out of that vision? War intensifies the choice. But each of us is asked for our vision and our action.