Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War

by Megan K. Stack Narrated by Dana Green

Overview

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 on 9/11, journalist Megan K. Stack, a* twenty-five-year-old national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, was thrust into Afghanistan and Pakistan, dodging gunmen and prodding warlords for information. From there, she traveled to war-ravaged Iraq and Lebanon and other countries scarred by violence, including Israel, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, witnessing the changes that swept the Muslim world and laboring to tell its stories.

Every Man in This Village Is a Liar is Megan K. Stack's riveting account of what she saw in the combat zones and beyond. She relates her initial wild excitement and her slow disillusionment as the cost of violence outweighs the elusive promise of freedom and democracy. She reports from under bombardment in Lebanon; records the raw pain of suicide bombings in Israel and Iraq; and, one by one, marks the deaths and disappearances of those she interviews.

Beautiful, savage, and unsettling, Every Man in This Village Is a Liar is a memoir about the wars of the* twenty-first century that readers will long remember.

Editorial Reviews

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.)

Kirkus Reviews

A bell-clear, powerful indictment of the debacle of recent Middle Eastern war policy. Since 9/11, Los Angeles Times Moscow bureau chief Stack has been covering the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon, and her account illustrates the senseless destruction and carnage wrought in the region by the United States and Israel. The author spoke with a diverse range of people involved, including Afghani warlords waiting on American guns in order to fight the Taliban, and probably allowing al-Qaeda fighters to escape into Pakistan for a fee; terrorist victims in Megiddo, Israel; Iraqi refugees from the American invasion; the pampered community of Americans at the Saudi Aramco compound; a Yemeni high-court judge espousing his methods of "theological redemption"; angry young demonstrators in Beirut in the aftermath of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri's assassination; and Egypt's pious Muslim Brotherhood, who attempted to proceed with elections in spite of the Mubarak government's "dirty tricks." "Somewhere between Afghanistan and Iraq," writes Stack bitterly, "we lost our way." What she saw in her travels clearly indicates that America-the idea of America-was held up as a model. But after the bombings, invasions and Abu Ghraib, America has deeply disappointed the people in these devastated regions. Stack's writing is visceral and intensely personal, as many of the people she knew and interviewed were killed-maybe even because she "took a chance with their lives" by being seen talking with them. "Countries, like people," she writes movingly, "have collective consciences and memories and souls, and the violence we deliver in the name of our nation is pooled like sickly tar at the bottom of who weare." Despite the war to bring democracy to the region, Stack observes, very little has changed, except a hardening, an acceptance of the seemingly endless condition of war. A scathing look at the human costs of war. Agent: Kathy Robbins/The Robbins Office

Stack, a journalist with the Los Angeles Times, got her start as a war correspondent on 9/11. On assignment in Paris, she was quickly dispatched to Afghanistan to cover the Taliban, to interview Afghan warlords, and to write about the war the U.S. thought it had won. But as her perspective from the ground makes clear, no one ever wins a war —not in that region.

More important than detailed coverage of the daily battles, attacks, and suicide bombings, Stack reveals the humans caught in the crossfire. She tells of Ahmed, a young Iraqi who confesses his dreams of a better life, then promptly disappears after a meeting one day. Stack dances with Afghan women usually clad in burqas, and meets with the expat wives of American oil company workers, living the American dream in a gated compound in Saudi Arabia. She listens to the anti-American, anti-Semitic rhetoric of Yemeni poets, and becomes a target of hate mail after writing about the unclaimed bodies of Palestinian suicide bombers.

Stack writes about the effects of war on the psyche of those involved, about how gazing into the abyss of war creates a vacuumin the people themselves. A collection of stories of ignored people locked in a permanent fight for survival, Every Man in This Village Is a Liar is a haunting and important book.

"With blistering eloquence and her own raw nerves laid bare [Stack shows us] war's impact on the non-combatants who bear the brunt of its horrors."
— Jon Krakauer, author of Into the Wild

Library Journal

Stack, a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, entered Afghanistan a few weeks after 9/11. Her initial excitement and eventual disillusionment with the war, and all the other wars she saw in Yemen, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Iraq, and Pakistan, make a sad story of death and failure by many parties as she wonders when the cost of violence outweighs the promise of freedom and democracy. For general readers on the Middle East as well as journalism students.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171846237
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	06/15/2010
Edition description:	Unabridged

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