Every Man in This Village is a Liar
An Education in War
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4.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A shattering account of war and disillusionment from a young woman reporter on the front lines of the war on terror.
A few weeks after the planes crashed into the World Trade Center, journalist Megan K. Stack was thrust into Afghanistan and Pakistan, dodging gunmen, prodding warlords for information, and witnessing the changes sweeping the Muslim world. Every Man in This Village Is a Liar is her riveting story of what she saw in the combat zones and beyond. She relates her initial wild excitement and slow disillusionment as the cost of violence outweighs the promise of democracy; she records the raw pain of suicide bombings in Israel and Iraq; and, one by one, she marks the deaths and disappearances of those she interviews.
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.)
