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Pages: 384
Date: June 2007
Format: Hardcover
ISBN 13: 978-0-9769261-0-8
Price: $28.95
Lovers and Madmen is dominated
by two central themes: politics and love. Julienne Busic’s
memoir takes the reader through the events which shaped her life
with Croatian dissident husband, Zvonko—assassination attempts,
threats from the Yugoslav secret police, flights from country
to country, enforced poverty and deprivation—and characterizes
the love which led to the greatest sacrifice of all: a sentence
of life in prison for the political hijacking of a TWA jet. Less
than twenty years after that desperate act, Yugoslavia broke
apart in a spasm of war and Croatia is now an independent state.
The message contained in the leaflets thrown during the hijacking
served as a prophecy of this disintegration and the Serbian aggression,
first in Croatia and Bosnia, and most recently in Albanian-populated
Kosovo. Julienne Busic served thirteen years in prison and was
released on parole in 1989.
Zvonko Busic is still incarcerated, almost thirty years later, in a maximum-security federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.
“This is a travelogue of the revolutionary life, an enduring love story, and an exploration, both unsettling and liberating, of international politics played out on the most personal level.”
—Claire Ortalda, writer, editor, and founding member of PEN Center, Oakland, California
"Busic’s book movingly illustrates how easy it is to be drawn emotionally by a burning sense of injustice into actions which ultimately have tragic and far-reaching repercussions. The 30-year detention of Zvonko Busic also shows how little value is placed on redemption and forgiveness by those who preach it, and especially how the system is unable to distinguish between one kind of ‘terrorism’ and another."
—John C.
Griffiths, former President
of British Liberal Party, and author