Sandstorm
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Sandstorm is the best kind of reportage: humane, historically-informed and full of details that only a writer close to the action could have noticed. The overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi has been one of the twenty-first century's defining moments: the Arab world's most bizarre dictator brought down by his own people with the aid of NATO aircraft.
Lindsey Hilsum was in Libya when Gaddafi met his squalid end. She traces the history of his strange regime from its beginnings - when Gaddafi had looks, charisma and popular appeal - to its paranoid, corrupt final state. At the heart of her book, however, is a brilliant narrative of Libyan people overcoming fear and disillusionment and finding the strength to rebel. Hilsum follows five of them through months of terror and tragedy.
This is the Libyan revolution as it was made and lived. Sandstorm will take its place in a library of classic books about turning points of history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Hilsum, international editor for Britain's Channel 4 News, draws on her reporting from the front lines of Libya's 2011 revolution for this dramatic account. Inspired by Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, Libyans took to the streets in February 2011 to challenge strongman Muammar Gaddafi's "forty-two years of brutal and capricious rule." Over the next eight months of "revolutionary conflict," the author made four trips to Libya to cover the turmoil. Embedded with the rebels, she reports the conflict almost exclusively from their vantage point. However, she is careful not to romanticize them or the revolution itself. Hilsum's portrait of Gaddafi's four decades of misrule and support for "militant and terror groups" is devastating, but the opposition is far from pristine. She reports that the rebels' early "war effort was a shambles" and was only reversed with foreign military intervention. She uncovers evidence of "revenge killing" and random violence among the victorious rebel factions, and warns that the Islamists are in a position to dominate the June 2012 elections for a new constituent assembly. Hilsum concludes with a warning that contrary to Western hopes for a democratic outcome, the "new Libya was a blank canvas." Though it's too soon for a definitive account of the Libyan revolution, Hilsum's early assessment is a timely first draft.
