Madness Visible by Janine di Giovanni

The images are what make Janine di Giovanni's book so shocking: the starving dogs with severed human hands in their mouths, the wards full of dead elderly people, left to die under piles of rags, the babies with their heads chopped off.

The images are what make Janine di Giovanni's book so shocking: the starving dogs with severed human hands in their mouths, the wards full of dead elderly people, left to die under piles of rags, the babies with their heads chopped off. But these are the realities of modern war, where civilians make up 90 per cent of casualties, and the combatants are sometimes schoolboys carrying Kalashnikovs larger than themselves. Madness Visible does not set out to shock, but rather to witness and report, and as a picture of conflict in our time, it is hard to see how it could have been done better. It is a terrifying account, soberly written.

Di Giovanni has been around these wars for a long time. For newspapers, she has written about Chechnya and Sierra Leone, East Timor, Liberia, Rwanda and Somalia: places whose names have become synonymous with the atrocities of our times. Towards the end of Madness Visible, she quotes a remark of Martha Gellhorn that it is only possible to love one war, and that the rest become responsibility.

For di Giovanni that war was Bosnia, and before, during and after the long siege of Sarajevo, she went back again and again, getting to know villages whose names no one remembered, just as few people really understood or remembered the causes of the war. She was in Sarajevo as buildings were burnt out and people queued in the snow for water; she was there again after it had been rebuilt, with Benetton shops and stores selling French cosmetics. She saw for herself the shelling, and wrote down what she saw.

As her frequent references make clear, di Giovanni is a great admirer of Gellhorn, and she shares something of Gellhorn's spare, precise style. Like Gellhorn, she writes about the unreality of time in war, when hours and minutes stretch, with intense periods of boredom, and short periods of fear.

Gellhorn's war, the Spanish Civil War, was also a time of informal soldiering, but a model of discipline compared to Bosnia. There, fresh-faced boys wearing Ralph Lauren ski hats under their helmets engaged in acts of senseless brutality; civilians were beaten and tortured before being axed to death.

In an orphanage for children born of the rape of thousands of Muslim women, di Giovanni noted bleakly how the babies seemed most neglected, because no one ever touched them. Why, she asks bitterly, making clear that for her, as for Gellhorn, the idea of impartiality was absurd, did Nato not launch air strikes eight years before they did, and so prevent the entire series of wars?

The actual span of Madness Visible covers the years 1999-2001. But the story it tells is of the entire decade, reconstructed from memory, interviews and conversations. Di Giovanni is particularly good at profiles of some of the main players, like Mira Markovic, Milosovic's wife, or Nikola Koljevic, the former Bosnian vice-president and Shakespearean scholar, who committed suicide. About these people she writes calmly but with hatred, just as she writes with huge sympathy for the generation trying to process the horror.

Madness Visible presents a stunning portrait of the anarchy, cruelty and overwhelming confusion of contemporary wars, when not even the identity of those bombing you is clear, and young women soldiers with spiky hair wait to attack villages full of old people and children.

Caroline Moorehead's life of Martha Gellhorn is published by Chatto & Windus