Pity the Nation

“Fisk writes the most compassionate and engaging prose about his own experiences in Lebanon. As a journalist he seems to get underneath the skin of that society better than just about anyone I know. And it’s a book I relate to very personally, having lived for five years in Lebanon and having been forced to leave the country because of the outbreak of the civil war. So I felt very close to his subject. Fisk, of course, stayed through the very worst days of the conflict, when any rat worth his skin was going to get on a ship and get out of Lebanon. And so he wrote the story of the horrors that he saw in war-torn Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s, and I think it probably stands as the best example of a book of political journalism of conflict in the Middle East that I can think of. He just writes like an angel.” Read more...

The best books on The Arabs

Eugene Rogan, Historian

British journalist Robert Fisk covered the Lebanese civil war for The Times of London. He was one of the very few foreign correspondents to remain in Beirut throughout the war. Pity the Nation is his story of the conflict. It was published in 1990 and is a gripping account of the horrors of that conflict, including the notorious Sabra and Chatila massacres of Palestinian refugees in 1982. Eugene Rogan of Oxford University’s Middle East Centre told us: “I think it probably stands as the best example of a book of political journalism, of conflict in the Middle East, that I can think of. He just writes like an angel.”

Lebanon