Where War Lives
A Journey into the Heart of War
-
- ¥2,200
-
- ¥2,200
発行者による作品情報
A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist takes us on a personal and historic journey from Mogadishu through Rwanda to Afghanistan and Iraq.
With the click of a shutter the world came to know Staff Sgt. William David Cleveland Jr. as a desecrated corpse. In the split-second that Paul Watson had to choose between pressing the shutter release or turning away, the world went quiet and Watson heard Cleveland whisper: “If you do this, I will own you forever.” And he has.
Paul Watson was born a rebel with one hand, who grew up thinking it took two to fire an assault rifle, or play jazz piano. So he became a journalist. At first, he loved war. He fed his lust for the bang-bang, by spending vacations with guerilla fighters in Angola, Eritrea, Sudan, and Somalia, and writing about conflicts on the frontlines of the Cold War. Soon he graduated to assignments covering some of the world’s most important conflicts, including South Africa, Rwanda, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
Watson reported on Osama bin Laden’s first battlefield victory in Somalia. Unwittingly, Watson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning photo of Staff Sgt. David Cleveland—whose Black Hawk was shot down over the streets of Mogadishu—helped hand bin Laden one of his earliest propaganda coups, one that proved barbarity is a powerful weapon in a modern media war. Public outrage over the pictures of Cleveland’s corpse forced President Clinton to order the world’s most powerful military into retreat. With each new beheading announced on the news, Watson wonders whether he helped teach the terrorists one of their most valuable lessons.
Much more than a journalist’s memoir, Where War Lives connects the dots of the historic continuum from Mogadishu through Rwanda to Afghanistan and Iraq.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Veteran war correspondent Watson takes the reader on a graphic tour of modern battlefields from Eritrea to Afghanistan, with a particularly haunting stop in war-torn Somalia. It was in Somalia that Watson photographed the corpse of an American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu a photo that set off a "firestorm of outrage" in the U.S. and won him a Pulitzer Prize. Watson claims that he was "consumed by anger, fear, and shame" after taking the picture and later sought exoneration from the soldier's family. A self-described "war junkie" who calls Kashmir "a fiery seductress," Watson is undeterred even when he's diagnosed with "chronic depression and post-traumatic stress disorder." The lessons that he learns "ar does not conquer evil," "truth is a moving target" and war "lives in all of us," among them are neither original nor particularly helpful. Watson is at his best describing the sights and sounds of war; his book suffers and he loses credibility when he poses as a journalist-savant whose only loyalty is to the truth.
