Breakup
A Marriage in Wartime
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Award-winning journalist Anjan Sundaram, hailed as “the Indian successor to Kapuscinski” (Basharat Peer) and praised for “remarkable” (Jon Stewart), “excellent” (Fareed Zakaria), and “courageous and heartfelt” (The Washington Post) work, must reckon with the devastating personal cost of war correspondence when he travels to the Central African Republic to report on preparations for a genocide hidden from the world, leaving his wife and newborn behind in Canada
After ten years of reporting from central Africa for The New York Times, Associated Press, and others, Anjan Sundaram finds himself living a quiet life in Shippagan, Canada, with his wife and newborn. But when word arrives of preparations for ethnic cleansing in the Central African Republic, he is suddenly torn between his duty as a husband and father, and his moral responsibility to report on a conflict unseen by the world.
Soon he is traveling through the CAR, with a driver who may be a spy, bearing witness to ransacked villages and locals fleeing imminent massacre, fielding offers of mined gold and hearing stories of soldiers who steal schoolbooks for rolling paper. When he refuses to return home, journeying instead into a rebel stronghold, he learns that there is no going back to the life he left behind.
Breakup illuminates the personal price that war correspondents pay as they bear witness on the frontlines of humanitarian crimes across the world. This brilliantly introspective, grounded account of one man’s inner turmoil in the context of a dangerous journey through a warzone is sure to become a modern classic.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
War correspondent Sundaram (Stringer) interweaves the geopolitical and the personal in this riveting account of "the most isolated major war in the world": the ongoing civil war in the Central African Republic between Christian and Muslim forces. In 2013, Sundaram left his wife and infant daughter to report on the conflict, which began that year when Muslim rebels overthrew president François Bozizé. Sundaram's companions included an American investigator for Human Rights Watch, a Central African journalist, and a local driver who might be a government spy. In matter-of-fact prose, Sundaram details their journey into the interior from the capital of Bangui, collecting eyewitness accounts of war crimes. Tragic details, including mass graves reeking of disinfectant, are balanced by profiles of courage: in one of the book's most remarkable scenes, an Italian nun serves "as a human shield" for 3,000 people taking sanctuary in her church. Though Sundaram's wife, a former war correspondent, pleads with him to come home, he pursues "greater reporting" in the war's most dangerous areas. The narrative reaches a crescendo when UN peacekeepers arrive to protect the refugees sheltering in the church and Sundaram returns to Canada and discovers that his marriage has been irreparably damaged. Concise history lessons explain how colonial rule exacerbated the conflict, and Sundaram makes the country's complex political and religious landscape accessible. The result is a powerful study of the forces that tear nations and people apart.
