During his first weeks covering the Yugoslav conflict from the rugged mountains along the Kosovo-Albanian border this spring, Newsweek correspondent and frequent Outside contributor Joshua Hammer was struck by the look and feel of the most remote territory in Europe, and by the terror and surrealism of the supercharged wartime environment. "In an odd way, my travels through Albania and Kosovo were the ultimate Outside story," Hammer told us via satellite telephone from Kosovo in late June, "a series of unbelievable road trips through a savage landscape, through beautiful scenery that, in places, is as primitive and grand in scale as the isolated reaches of the Himalayas."

While reporting breaking news in the course of two long stints in the Balkans in April and June, Hammer also kept a journal of the adventure he and other journalists were sharing on the front lines. (See "Into Kosovo," page 64.) Not only were these adventures familiar, in many ways, to Hammer, who has previously witnessed shelling and machine-gun duels in the Sudan and urban shoot-outs in Somalia, but they are the kind of assignment, it turns out, that the former roving Newsweek Africa correspondent finds almost irresistible. "All I can tell you is that I missed it when I was away," he said about covering combat. "And when I got back to it, it felt like I'd never been away. The press corps sees horrible things, but we also share the experience of witnessing powerful, dramatic, and moving events."

As challenging and sometimes harrowing as war journalism can be, Hammer said that his first book, Chosen by God: A Brother's Journey, coming this fall from Hyperion, is "the hardest thing I ever wrote." It's a memoir, Hammer said, that chronicles his efforts to mend a 17-year breach that began with his brother's conversion to ultra-Orthodox Judaism. "This was too close to home," he confessed. "It's one thing to try to describe things objectively, and a whole other thing to describe yourself and your feelings."