Every Man in This Village Is a Liar
an education in war
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3.7 • 6 Ratings
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A few weeks after the planes crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11, journalist Megan Stack, a 25-year-old national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, was thrust into Afghanistan and Pakistan, dodging gunmen and prodding warlords for information. From there, she travelled to war-ravaged Iraq and Lebanon and to other countries scarred by violence, including Israel, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, witnessing the changes that swept the Muslim world, and striving to tell its stories.
Every Man in This Village Is a Liar is Megan Stack’s unique and breathtaking account of what she saw in the combat zones and beyond. She relates her initial wild excitement and her slow disillusionment as the cost of violence outweighs the elusive promise of freedom and democracy. She reports from under bombardment in Lebanon; documents the growth of unusual friendships; records the raw pain of suicide bombings in Israel and Iraq; and, one by one, marks the deaths and disappearances of those she interviews.
Beautiful, savage, and unsettling, Every Man in This Village Is a Liar is a deeply human memoir about the wars of the 21st century. It is an indispensable book of our times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An American reporter takes in one Middle East cataclysm after another in this searing memoir. Los Angeles Times correspondent Stack covered the war in Afghanistan after Sept. 11, then bounced around to other hot-spot postings, including Israel during the second Intifada, occupied Baghdad, and southern Lebanon during the 2006 conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. Stack offers gripping accounts of the sorrows of war, especially of the traumas Afghan and Lebanese civilians endured under American and Israeli bombing, but she also writes evocatively of quieter pathologies: Libya s jovially sinister totalitarian regime, corruption under Egypt s quasi-dictatorship, and lyric anti-Semitism at a Yemeni poetry slam. Dropping journalistic detachment in favor of a novelistic style, she enters the story as a protagonist whose travails fending off a lecherous Afghan warlord, seething under the humiliating restrictions of Saudi Arabia s gender apartheid system illuminate the societies she encounters. The big-picture lessons Stack draws The Middle East goes crazy and we go along with it are none too cogent, but her vivid, atmospheric prose and keen empathy make her a superb observer of the region s horrific particulars. (Jun.)
Customer Reviews
A must read
Everyone should read this book at least once! It is beautifully written!