The Lion's Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan

Rating:
Summary: Bullets Whizzing?
Review: A quote on the top of this paperback reads "raw combat reportage... it's easy to miss the bullets whizzing by". I was surely taken in by this and just as surely disappointed.

At one point Mr. Anderson describes how a Mujahideen soldier reaches under his chair and steals his can of Pepsi. Mr. Anderson snatches the can back and this is the level of wartime action you can expect to find in this pedestrian account of Afghanistan after September Eleventh.

This is reporting from behind enemy lines - WAY behind them. It is a series of articles written about interviews the author conducts with the major players in Afghanistan. Each article is "framed" by not particularly interesting emails describing the difficulties involved with travelling to and around in the country, and the challenges of communicating with satellite phones.

The Lion's Grave serves as a readable introduction to the history of Afghanistan through the eyes and ears of those who shaped it and lived through it. It fills in a lot of face-to-face detail about the larger-than-life characters jostling for power in the remains of a smashed country that has undergone one major upheaval after another. It is also a chilling account of how bad things are in that part of the world, and how its people are indivisibly split by a common religion, and united by a hatred of the U.S.

It is NOT raw combat footage. For that, try Black Hawk Down and/or ChickenHawk.

Rating:
Summary: Not Hubris At All
Review: Full disclosure: While I do think Lion's Grave is a tremendous book, and provides a unique insight into the way journalists cover zones, I should also point out that I'm Jon Lee Anderson's younger brother. Rather than trying to pad his numbers, however, my main motive for writing is in amusement over Hilliard's comment that it seemed a bit Rambo-esque (i.e. unbelievable) that Jon Lee would give a tongue-lashing to a group of heavily-armed 20 year olds. After having traveled through five war zones with Jon Lee over the years, I can assure you that this is exactly the sort of thing he does do! Ill-advised, perhaps, but not hubris - and certainly not Ramboesque.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Journalism
Review: I had already read most of the articles in this book prior to buying it and frankly I found this collection to be quite interesting. I've read few journalistic accounts of the events in Afghanistan post-September 11, 2002 that seem to capture the ugly warfare, back stabbing, and confusing alliances quite as well as this one. If you haven't read any of these articles in The New Yorker, it's very much worth reading.

Rating:
Summary: Average Reporters Journal
Review: In this book, John Lee Anderson provides a fairly insightful and educational narrative of his experiences inside Afghanistan after the 9-11 attacks. In it, you read of his encounters with various people inside Afghanistan, some colorful and tragic, others brutal and dangerous. The book serves as a nice backdrop of Afghanistan during the US war there, and the immediate consequences of it. However, it suffers from a few flaws that kept this from being a really good book.

The book is titled the Lions Grave as a reference to the grave of one of the most tragic figures in Afghanistan, Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Lion of the Panjshir. Several of the articles reference him, and his presence is felt almost constantly throughout the book, as it is in Afghanistan. Massoud was the charismatic leader of the Northern Alliance, the hodgepodge group of fighters opposing the Taliban. Just two days before the 9-11 attacks, two men sent by Osama Bin Laden managed to kill Massoud by dressing like reporters. This was in order to fracture the delicate alliance, to hamper any assault on the Taliban. Anderson points out how the man has become an almost religious figure, worshipped by millions of Afghanis. Anderson gives us a cursory look at the politics of the alliance, highlighting their disagreements and past atrocities. All throughout the book, you get a sense of the total devastation of the country, which has really fallen into the dark ages. I was surprised at how dangerous it was for the reporters sent to Afghanistan, as the countryside and the roads were patrolled regularly by all sorts of heavily armed brigands. One other interesting theme of the book was the educated class of Afghanistan that we usually do not hear about. It may come as a surprise to many readers, but Afghanistan was once a pretty civilized country. The remnants of this era survive in little hamlets of professional and academic men and women, desperate for a way out of the constant turmoil. I found that the most tragic part of the book.

There are a few reasons I did not really love this book. First, it is way too short and barely scratches the surface of the situation. Now I know this was not meant to be an in depth look at Afghanistan, this is just Anderson's story. Still, I felt like a lot more commentary was needed at certain parts, where themes are broached but never examined. Also, the book is full of interludes of real emails Anderson was sending back to his editors. At first, this is a clever and exciting way to track his movements on a day by day basis, but eventually it becomes tedious.

An average reporters book.

Rating:
Summary: a waste of money
Review: Mr. Anderson got into Afghanistan at the beginning of the war, talked to anybody who would talk to him, and recorded his conversations. That's it. Out of this he got a couple articles for the New Yorker, but not enough to make the requisite inch and a quarter book thickness, so he filled in with emails between him and his editor. I'm not kidding, this is all there is to the book. No American who knew what was going on (by his admission) would talk to him, and the Afghanis who knew what was going on gave him their boilerplate PR spiel. You would learn more about the latest afghani war by watching the network news sound bites, and MUCH more by reading the reportage and think pieces that came out of Afghanistan from NYT, Washington Post, and LA Times (hey guys, what about an anthology of this stuff?). Don't waste your money and time.

Rating:
Summary: a waste of money
Review: The Lion's Grave, Dispatches from Afghanistan by Jon Lee Anderson takes you inside the first few weeks of the war in Afghanistan as American forces moved across the country. Several reporters followed the soldiers into combat, expect Anderson covered the war from the perspective of the Afghani Northern Alliance and the newly freed people. Anderson is one of the first reporters into the country after September 11th. Using several connections he manages to attain a passport into the country through the Russian embassy. The moment he enters the country Anderson places his life in danger. He is on the front lines reporting the war, expect he has no safe haven like the American reporters did in Operation Iraqi freedom. There are no American troops to protect him if he comes under attack, and the only other people around that spoke English were his translator and his photographer, who was from Germany.
The book is a collection of all the pieces Anderson wrote while covering the war for "The New Yorker" magazine. He has worked for the magazine for 20 years, and has covered hot beds of conflict around the globe.
Connecting each separate story is a series of emails that Anderson wrote to his editor who was back home in the states. I believe their intended purpose was to help connect each story and create a time line of events that helps lay the groundwork for Anderson's stories. But the emails end up feeling more like they are just their filling up space and padding the content to create a book. Plus more often then not they swing and miss. While some are very revealing and show the hardships Anderson endured while covering the war, "Another big dust story today, and a cold front. Visibility is almost nil, and the sat phone transmission is very bad. I've been trying for several hours to download two emails that are in my system," others seem to be just boring exchanges in which you only hear one end of the conversation.
I will admit that since I was not familiar with Afghani history I did have trouble keeping up with some of his stories. Several names might be thrown at the reader all a once making it hard to keep track of who was who. Then you throw city names into the mix and you could easily find yourself very confused.
Overall I would have to recommend the book. It is an interesting look into recent history from a non-American viewpoint of the world. And anyone interested in the Middle East should definitely give this book a try. I give it 4 stars.

Rating:
Summary: The Lion's Grave, Dispactches from Afghanistan
Review: The Lion's Grave, Dispatches from Afghanistan by Jon Lee Anderson takes you inside the first few weeks of the war in Afghanistan as American forces moved across the country. Several reporters followed the soldiers into combat, expect Anderson covered the war from the perspective of the Afghani Northern Alliance and the newly freed people. Anderson is one of the first reporters into the country after September 11th. Using several connections he manages to attain a passport into the country through the Russian embassy. The moment he enters the country Anderson places his life in danger. He is on the front lines reporting the war, expect he has no safe haven like the American reporters did in Operation Iraqi freedom. There are no American troops to protect him if he comes under attack, and the only other people around that spoke English were his translator and his photographer, who was from Germany.
The book is a collection of all the pieces Anderson wrote while covering the war for "The New Yorker" magazine. He has worked for the magazine for 20 years, and has covered hot beds of conflict around the globe.
Connecting each separate story is a series of emails that Anderson wrote to his editor who was back home in the states. I believe their intended purpose was to help connect each story and create a time line of events that helps lay the groundwork for Anderson's stories. But the emails end up feeling more like they are just their filling up space and padding the content to create a book. Plus more often then not they swing and miss. While some are very revealing and show the hardships Anderson endured while covering the war, "Another big dust story today, and a cold front. Visibility is almost nil, and the sat phone transmission is very bad. I've been trying for several hours to download two emails that are in my system," others seem to be just boring exchanges in which you only hear one end of the conversation.
I will admit that since I was not familiar with Afghani history I did have trouble keeping up with some of his stories. Several names might be thrown at the reader all a once making it hard to keep track of who was who. Then you throw city names into the mix and you could easily find yourself very confused.
Overall I would have to recommend the book. It is an interesting look into recent history from a non-American viewpoint of the world. And anyone interested in the Middle East should definitely give this book a try. I give it 4 stars.

Rating:
Summary: Bullets Whizzing?
Review: This is a very readable account of post-9/11 Afghanistan, and I finished it in the course of one day. I did notice, however, after reading this book and his current dispatches from Iraq, that the US itself is sort of an unseen factor in all of his work, implicit in the goings-on but not directly reported on. For example, during his time with the Northern Alliance, there is one description of a B-52 strafing a hillside and that is our one explicit clue that a massive campaign is occuring. Instead, we are graced with very intricate and impressive first-hand accounts of internal Afghani struggles, specifically concerning the assassination of Massoud. I think that Anderson's very noble intention is to prevent Afghanistan (and subsequently, Iraq) from becoming an abstract idea for Americans, by supplying readers here with details about life under siege. I would've enjoyed a bit more specific information about American operations and strategy, but I was not disappointed at all with what was provided in Anderson's account.

Rating:
Summary: Good Book With Some Hubris
Review: This was kind of a spooky book. The added e-mail notes at the start of each chapter gave you a real since of what it must have been like for the reporters in Afghanistan and their support staffs back in the real world. The book is basically the author's description of his four months in the country right after 9-11. The writing is so descriptive that it almost reads like a novel. The stuff he has to go through just to get the story out is something else. Also the level of danger for the reports, not even close to the front line, would make the average person question the line of work they chose.

The book was not a full description of what was going on in the whole country or the war effort, just the magazine article like description of his travels and reporting. To be fair, the book could have used a bit of this detail as an extra narrative to really make the reader understand what the author is going through in the context of the whole country. One other small point, the author details a few instances where he lets some Afghan soldiers have a piece of his mind with them holding loaded weapons. In a country that has not seen any rule of law for 25 years and has basically been the worlds largest OK Corral shoot up, it seamed a little too Rambo like for the unarmed author to be insulting 20 year old thugs with automatic weapons in the middle of no where. Overall the book was very entertaining and interesting. If you are interested in this part of the world then you could do worse.