Academic

Books by authors braver than I am

By Tung Yin

A couple of recent books spring to mind where I was left thinking, how seriously brave/crazy did the author have to be to do the research to write this book?

First, there's Megan Stack, Every Man in This Village is a Liar, which is a collection of vignettes about her life in the early 2000s reporting from Afghanistan, Lebanon, and other dangerous places, and often without any sort of military escort.

Then there's Jessica Stern, Terror in the Name of God, which synthesizes four years of on-and-off research where the author interviewed a whole bunch of religiously motivated terrorists -- Christian, Jewish, and Muslim.  Most of them were not in prison when she interviewed them, and in many instances, this took place in foreign countries where she was suspected of being CIA or Mossad!  Stern did have her limits, though; the only al Qaeda person she interviewed was in U.S. custody.  She forthrightly admits that she was afraid to seek out others.  I don't blame her!

I suppose another book by someone braver than I am is Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down, given that Bowden ventured into Somalia with an interpreter to get as much of a picture as he could from the Somali point of view of the 1993 firefight that killed over a dozen U.S. troops and hundreds of Somalis.

Full post as published by The Yin Blog on March 07, 2011 (boomark / email).