Synopses & Reviews
With the Israeli-Palestinian crisis reaching wartime levels, where is the latest confrontation between these two old foes leading? Robert Fisk's explosive
Pity the Nation recounts Sharon and Arafat's first deadly encounter in Lebanon in the early 1980s and explains why the IsraelPalestine relationship seems so intractable.
A remarkable combination of war reporting and analysis by an author who has witnessed the carnage of Beirut for twenty-five years, Fisk, the first journalist to whom bin Laden announced his jihad against the U.S., is one of the world's most fearless and honored foreign correspondents. He spares no one in this saga of the civil war and subsequent Israeli invasion: the PLO, whose thuggish behavior alienated most Lebanese; the various Lebanese factions, whose appalling brutality spared no one; the Syrians, who supported first the Christians and then the Muslims in their attempt to control Lebanon; and the Israelis, who tried to install their own puppets and, with their 1982 invasion, committed massive war crimes of their own. It includes a moving finale that recounts the travails of Fisk's friend Terry Anderson who was kidnapped by Hezbollah and spent 2,454 days in captivity.
Fully updated to include the Israeli withdrawl from south Lebanon and Ariel Sharon's electoral victory over Ehud Barak, this edition has sixty pages of new material and a new preface.
Review
"Robert Fisk's enormous book about Lebanon's desperate travails is one of the most distinguished in recent years, as well as one of the most anguished and hard-bitten....Pity the Nation is in fact a definitive personal record of defeat and pointless suffering, a sadly unedifying tale of the contests between Palestinians, Lebanese, Israelis, Syrians and others." Edward Said
Review
"He is a devastating witness to the failure of politics to guard mankind against itself." Sunday Times (UK)
Review
"Robert Fisk is one of the outstanding reporters of this generation. As a war correspondent he is unrivalled." Financial Times
Review
"One is left in awe at...[Fisk's] industry, commitment and courage in reporting the ugliest of the world's current conflicts: wonder, too, that Fisk can still write with sanity after witnessing such inhumanity." Literary Review
About the Author
Robert Fisk is Middle East Correspondent of the Independent, based in Beirut, and this highly acclaimed book is the fruit of twenty-six years' of reporting from Lebanon, where he covered the civil war and two Israeli invasions. Educated in Britain and Ireland, Fisk holds more journalism awards twenty-four than any other foreign correspondent for his reporting of the Iranian revolution and wars in Lebanon, the Persian Gulf, Kosovo and Algeria. He won the 2000 Amnesty International award for his reports from Serbia on NATO's bombardment of Yugoslavia and received the 2001 David Watt Memorial Award for his reporting from the Middle East.