Customer Reviews

The Lion's Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

I heard Jon Lee Anderson speaking of one of his adventures with an afghan warlord on NPR, and was instantly intrigued. His book, along with Thmoas Dworzak's photos offer an intimate look at the fractured afghan society, or lack thereof, that regular media outlets have not been able to afford us. You feel for some of the men he meets in his dangerous travels, yet these same men can disgust you. The various field reports are tired together with e-mail correspondence between Anderson and his editor. The sense of danger and urgency in these e-mails is at times astounding.

Anderson is a great writer and I enjoyed his biography of Che. This book is a series of articles Anderson wrote for the New Yorker magazine. It is obvious that Anderson placed himself at some risk in getting these stories and I enjoyed his viewpoint on post Taliban Afghanistan. The only good insightful material was about the assasination of Massoud and how it was done. Little of this has filtered out to the West. Much of the rest of the book was a rehash of what other journalists have found out about Afghanistan.

This is a short enjoyable read by a great writer. There are other books out there that are better. However, this is a concise read on post Taliban Afghanistan.

I was really looking forward to reading this book to learn what was happening on the ground in Afghanistan in the months immediately after 9/11. But I ended up really not liking it, mostly because of the writing style.

The chapters alternate between the articles Jon Lee Anderson wrote for the New Yorker from Afghanistan and the emails he exchanged with his editor during that same period. I enjoyed the emails, which provided great insight into the challenges and difficulties, not to mention the dangers, that reporters faced in that part of the world during that period. My problem, though, was with the articles themselves. The writing, frankly, was boring. I'm sure it is considered extremely literary among those who are familiar with old school writing styles. It has that Graham Greene/Paul Theroux flair, where the writer sets himself up as an everyman passing through some distant land and records his experiences and observations in a travelogue-style that I'm sure was highly engaging in an era when contemporaneous forms of media didn't condition us to expect something livelier. But today, that style comes across as unnecessarily slow and oblique. While I ate up the emails, reading the articles themselves was more like wading through quicksand. I repeatedly found myself going back over a passage three or four times to try to understand where Anderson was (in his narrative), what he was trying to communicate, and how it related to the preceding passage.

The shame is that I'm convinced Anderson had much to relate and could have delivered a much more compelling narrative and offered much more insight into the Afghanistan of that period, if only he had used a different style of writing.

(And I will add that I'm somewhat self-conscious about writing this, because I know Anderson has been heralded as one of the great foreign correspondents of our era. I have no doubt about his ability to get where it's happening, when it's happening and to do great on-the-ground reporting. I simply think the writing style needs to be updated for a modern audience.)

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.

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.

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.