Pity The Nation
The Abduction of Lebanon
Robert Fisk
November 2002
ISBN: 1560254424
Written by one of Britain's most distinguished journalists, this remarkable book is an epic account of the Lebanon conflict by an author who has personally witnessed the carnage of Beirut for twenty-six years. It is a story of Western betrayal and the challenge to American power and prestige in the Middle East. This book tells, too, in frightening detail, the story of the Middle East's first suicide bombers and their first devastating strike at Americans.
Through a combination of war reporting and political analysis, Robert Fisk describes Lebanon's ferocious civil war and subsequent Israeli invasions--the Lebanese militias, whose appalling brutality spared no one; the US Marines, who found themselves trapped in the horror of Lebanon, where many of them were to meet a terrible fate; and the Israelis, who tried to install their own puppet rulers, and with their 1982 invasion provoked war crimes of their own. Fully updated to include the 2000 Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon and Ariel Sharon's electoral victory the following year, this American edition has sixty pages of new material and a revised preface.
What readers are saying
"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
"He is a devastating witness to the failure of politics to guard mankind against itself."
--Sunday Times (UK)
"Robert Fisk is one of the outstanding reporters of this generation. As a war correspondent he is unrivalled."
--Financial Times
"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
Pity the Nation remains the defining history of the Lebanese conflict."
--Nick Greenslade, In These Times
About the Authors
Robert Fisk, a best-selling author and journalist, has lived in the Middle East for three decades. The world's most celebrated foreign correspondent, he has received numerous awards and was named British Press Awards' International Journalist of the Year seven times. Fisk's previous books include Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon and The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, both of which received wide critical acclaim. Fisk is currently the Middle East correspondent for The Independent (UK) and lived in Beirut.
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