Product Description

Pity the Nation ranks among the classic accounts of war in our time, both as historical document and as an eyewitness testament to human savagery. Written by one of Britain's foremost journalists, this remarkable book combines political analysis and war reporting in an unprecedented way: it is an epic account of the Lebanon conflict by an author who has personally witnessed the carnage of Beirut for over a decade. Fisk's book recounts the details of a terrible war but it also tells a story of betrayal and illusion, of Western blindness that had led inevitably to political and military catastrophe. Updated and revised, Fisk's book gives us a further insight into this troubled part of the world. 'Robert Fisk is one of the outstanding reporters of this generation. As a war correpondent he is unrivalled.' Edward Mortimer, Financial Times

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13498 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 727 pages

Amazon.co.uk Reviews
Twenty-five years after first setting foot on Lebanese soil, award-winning journalist Robert Fisk has revised his brilliant study of this troubled country, Pity the Nation, for a third edition, to include the years since its initial publication in 1990. Artificially created as a country by the French in 1920, Lebanon's revenge was to "welcome all her invaders and then kiss them to death". Since arriving during the 1976 Muslim-Maronite civil war, Fisk has travelled its length to seek out, as well as provide, eye-witness account of combat and atrocity. The book's main pre-occupation is the Israeli invasion of the early 1980s and its terrible aftermath, including the appalling massacre of Palestinians at the Shabra and Chatila camps. Banned in Lebanon itself, the first edition of Pity the Nation ended with close friend and colleague Terry Anderson still being held by Islamic Jihad. Inevitably, Anderson's release in 1991, along with other Western hostages such as Terry Waite and John McCarthy, emotionally informs the bulk of the new material, which also considers the Gulf War, Islamic resurgence, the collapse of the Oslo peace agreement and the bloody 1996 Qana massacre in a UN refugee compound by Israeli forces, to which Fisk bears terrible witness. He sees Yasser Arafat make the transmission from "terrorist to superstatesman to superterrorist", but by the end of this exhaustive testimony, virtually the last Western journalist left in West Beirut, he admits, "I still fear the monsters". And then Ariel Sharon is elected prime minister of Israel in February 2001.

Fisk, formerly of The Times and now Middle East correspondent for The Independent, writes as combatively as the events he so vividly describes. With a fastidious eye for detail, he rails against day-tripping reporters who betray truth with their clichés and loose language, constantly defending language against false appropriation: "terrorism", for example, wielded by one side to describe acts committed against them, deprives the term of any objective purpose and thus legitimises reprisal. He makes reparation with this unique and passionate analysis, still angry after all these years, which remains the most relentless and convincing account yet of the bloodiest quarter-century in Lebanon's history. --David Vincent

Customer Reviews

Powerful, essential to understanding modern Lebanon
Probably one of the most powerful books I have ever read, Fisk gets to the heart of Lebanon and all of its diversity.

I found this book intellectually satisfying in that at its conclusion I felt I finally had a grasp of how the country's complex political arrangements actually work. This has really helped to provide some context to the ongoing turmoil in Lebanon and the region. The book also made an impact on an emotional level as I felt a real pang of terror during the recent Hezbollah-Israeli conflict, as if someone I know personally were being violated. A powerful book, indeed.

Fisk writes from and about Lebanon from the point of view of a transplanted native. This is what gives his writing its passion, but also its shall we say "non-mainstream" perspective. One assumes the average reader is intelligent enough to take this into account in developing one's own views on the many conflicts the book describes.

This is one of two books most often recommended as introductions to the study of Lebanon and especially its relationship with Israel, the other being Thomas Friedman's "From Beirut to Jerusalem". Friedman's book is the more readable for a general audience; Fisk's intense work is for those who really want to delve deeply into the subject.

Mesmerising
This book is a haunting testament to the tragedies that have been such a large part of Lebanon's recent history. If, like me, you knew little of the Lebanon before reading the book, you will find yourself in the hands of someone who knows about what atrocities have taken place because he has witnessed them at first hand. The descriptions haunt me still.

But this is more than just a history book. It is the story of a journalist working in the Middle East and provides an insight into the challenges of reporting in a climate dominated by violence. Fisk shares with his readers the exhaustion, fear, frustration and even nausea that would seem to have been his constant companions during much of his time in the Lebanon.

This is not a book to enjoy, but it is a book to value. From the opening pages on the Nazi Holocaust, to description of the massacre at Sabra and Chatila, Fisk reports with compassion and even handed condemnation of the perpertrators. Few books have had the impact on me that Pity The Nation has had.

The most beautiful book I've read, but not the best history
This book divides opinion in those who read it. To make a gross generalisation, those towards the right see it as overly critical of the Israelis and the US, those towards the left as the real experience Lebanon and its people, which just so happened to suffer from their involvement.

Personally, as a great admirer of Robert Fisk's journalism in The Independent I tend toward the latter, however, there are some problems with Pity The Nation as a historical account.

The wider historical events surrounding Lebanon's history are underdeveloped. Vital actions that shaped the region (for example the Arab-Israeli wars) are neglected. While this is in some ways an unfair criticism (after all, this is a book about Lebanon) without wider historical context the actions of key players are not sufficiently explained, a problem I found as this was the first book I read on the Middle East.

Also, as a journalist's account, it sometimes lacks the cohesion of an academic's historical analysis. For example, Orlando Figes' account of the Russian Revolution (a different topic I know, but the principle is still valid) has a framework of a political, social and economic history through which he weaves the stories of individuals. This allows him to give the sweeping narrative depth. Without such a clearly explained political, social and economic history, Pity The Nation is so full of personal accounts that it can get bogged down in the Lebanon's sheer complexity.

However both of my criticisms reflect not failings in the book but in what I (and other readers, perhaps) expected. This is not an academic account of Middle East history; this is the account of a journalist, reporting what he saw (and lived, his home being in Beirut). And he does it extraordinarily well. Every account of a tragedy or personal story is emotive, informative and beautifully described. He obviously loves Lebanon and this seeps through the pages of his book. The descriptions are so vivid that it feels like you can smell the orange groves and feel the electricity in the air as a storm rolls in off the Mediterranean. This makes the tales of Lebanon's people even harder to read. 'Touching', 'moving' and 'tragic' seem clichéd and inadequate to describe his accounts of real lives, real people, which have been destroyed. Yet even when on the verge of impenetrable bleakness, a dark sense of humour shows through. In one case he describes being cautioned for a traffic offence during the siege of Beirut in 1982, and in another he mentions a man who hijacked a plane bound for Beirut and ordered it to fly to... Beirut.

Overall, this account represents the best in foreign reporting. Lebanon was not a place Robert Fisk was viewing from the outside; it was his home. He has a deep understanding of events, a potent desire to find the truth and a great talent for expressing the experience of real people. Pity The Nation is the result, and it deserves to be read by as many people as possible.