The New York Review Abroad : Fifty Years of International Reportage

Report from Vietnam I. The home program / Mary McCarthy -- Paris in the spring / Stephen Spender -- The corpse at the iron gate / V.S. Naipaul -- Sad Brazil / Elizabeth Hardwick -- Letter from South Africa / Nadine Gordimer -- Liverpool: notes from the underground / Caroline Blackwood -- Going crazy in India / Rosemary Dinnage -- In El Salvador / Joan Didion -- The Sakharovs in Gorky / Natalya Viktorovna and Vladmir Tolz -- The burial of Cambodia / William Shawcross -- "I am prepared for anything" / Jerzy Popiełuszko -- Fire on the road / Ryszard Kapuściński -- The revolution of the magic lantern / Timothy Garton Ash -- Godot comes to Sarajevo / Susan Sontag -- The nowhere city / Amos Elon -- Love and misery in Cuba / Alma Guillermoprieto -- Tibet disenchanted / Ian Buruma -- AIDS: the lesson of Uganda / Helen Epstein -- Arrested in China / Kang Zhengguo -- With the Northern Alliance / Tim Judah -- The suicide bombers / Avishai Margalit -- Delusions in Baghdad / Mark Danner -- Left out in Turkey / Christopher de Bellaigue -- The battle for Egypt's future / Yasmine El Rashidi -- An exclusive corner of Hebron / Jonathan Freedland -- A farewell to Haiti / Mischa Berlinski -- Is Libya cracking up? / Nicolas Pelham.

For the past fifty years, The New York Review of Books has covered virtually every international revolution and movement of consequence by dispatching the world’s most brilliant writers to write eyewitness accounts. The New York Review Abroad not only brings together twenty-eight of the most riveting of these pieces but includes epilogues that update and reassess the political situation (by either the original authors or by Ian Buruma). Among the pieces included are:
 
• Susan Sontag’s personal narrative of staging Waiting for Godot in war-torn Sarajevo
• Alma Guillermoprieto’s report from inside Colombia’s guerrilla headquarters and her disturbing encounter with young female fighters
• Ryszard Kapuscinski’s terrifying description of being set on fire while running roadblocks in Nigeria
• Caroline Blackwood’s coverage of the 1979 gravediggers’ strike in Liverpool—a noir mini-masterpiece
• Timothy Garton Ash’s minute-by-minute account from the Magic Lantern theater in Prague in 1989, where the subterranean stage, auditorium, foyers, and dressing rooms had become the headquarters of the revolution

Among other writers whose New York Review pieces will be included are Tim Judah, Amos Elon, Joan Didion, William Shawcross, Christopher de Bellaigue, and Mark Danner.
 
A tour de force of vivid and enlightening writing from the front lines, this volume is indeed the first rough draft of the history of the past fifty years.

A collection of 27 pieces covering international events, originally published in the New York Review of Books between 1967 and 2012