There are two very enjoyable books about recent Bosnian/Yugoslavian history, both of them well-written, easy reads but at the same time full of cultural info.
The first is a novel, Nowhere Man by Aleksandar Hemon, Picador: 2002. With a skill and style reminiscent of John Irving (e.g. Hotel New Hampshire), this ex Sarajevan has written a novel with local flavor, giving anecdotes of two boys who come of age around the time of Tito’s death and later are seperated during the war years. Early in the story the two characters, Ponek and Mirza, form a Beatles band in junior high. Passing over the possible band names “Gospoda” (the Gentlemen), and "KGB" (wouldn’t do well in the West they think), they settle on naming the band with a literal translation of beetle: "Bube". The boys eventually gig on the university campus at “the overcrowded Dental Students Club, called predictably, ‘Zub’ (the Tooth) and the Medical Students Club, called, a little less predictably, ‘Kuk’ (the Hip) to an audience of drunken students, horny and uninterested, eager to forget bleeding gums, jars full of fetuses, and spongy hearts.” Nowhere Man is a page-turner but with considerable substance and relates the feelings of a certain class of Sarajevan.
A heavier piece of reportage is Safe Area Gorazde, by Joe Sacco (Fantagraphics: 2000. ISBN 1-56097-470-2). This is Sacco’s accounting of the weeks he spent around Gorazde, right on the front lines of the ethnic cleansing in 1992-1995 in the Drina river valley, near the border with Serbia. Safe Area Gorazde is actually a thick, black and white comic book. Its 225 heavily illustrated pages relate stories from that benighted city using comics in a way that words or pictures alone cannot.
This book is a high water mark in both war reportage and the use of comics as a communication device. It cost $20 but I would willingly pay $60 if I had to buy it again. 
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