Me Against My Brother: At War in Somalia, Sudan and Rwanda - Softcover

Peterson, Scott

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0415930634 ISBN 13: 9780415930635

Publisher: Routledge, 2001

Synopsis

As a foreign correspondent, Scott Peterson witnessed firsthand Somalia's descent into war and its battle against US troops, the spiritual degeneration of Sudan's Holy War, and one of the most horrific events of the last half century: the genocide in Rwanda.  In Me Against My Brother, he brings these events together for the first time to record a collapse that has had an impact far beyond African borders.In Somalia, Peterson tells of harrowing experiences of clan conflict, guns and starvation.  He met with warlords, observed death intimately and nearly lost his own life to a Somali mob. From ground level, he documents how the US-UN relief mission devolved into all out war - one that for America has proven to be the most formative post-Cold War debacle.  In Sudan, he journeys where few correspondents have ever been, on both sides of that religious front line, to find that outside "relief" has only prolonged war.  In Rwanda, his first-person experience of the genocide and well-documented analysis provide rare insight into this human tragedy.Filled with the dust, sweat and powerful detail of real-life, Me Against My Brother graphically illustrates how preventive action and a better understanding of Africa - especially by the US - could have averted much suffering. Also includes a 16-page color insert.

About this title

About the Author:

Scott Peterson is currently the Middle East correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, and is based in Amman, Jordan. He covered Africa for The Daily Telegraph of London and his photography regularly appears in Time, Newsweek, Life, The New York Times Magazine, and Harper's.

From Kirkus Reviews:

The appalling tragedies of Somalia, the Sudan, and Rwanda during the 1990s told with breath-stealing intensity by war correspondent Peterson (Wall Street Journal). Peterson's hope in these pages is that by vividly detailing his experiences as a journalist with both the military and political forces at play in these African countries, he might twist readers' sensibilities just enough to make them react the next time a place is visited by those four old familiars: war, famine, pestilence, and death. In writing as agile and alert as a ranger in a combat zone, Peterson takes the story into the extremes, where war crimes are standard fare and everyone from locals to foreign interventionists to church and relief officials can display a savage wickedness (though he is fast to note that there are angels, too, if hardly thick on the ground). Peterson cannily and quite judgmentally serves forth the grotesque consequences of an inept US foreign policy, showing how neglect on the part of the international community inspired overreaction or simple abandonment on the part of the USas in Rwanda. There are also the unedifying examples of the humanitarian missions that began to choose sides, and the chronic rhythms of religious conflict. And the generally antagonistic relationship between the military and the correspondents, which colonizes the book like a disease, only adds to the atmosphere of every-man-for-himself-and-God-against-all. Rising like the dead from the narrative are a scattering of rude truths and more grim encounters than can be taken in, including those moments that correspondents always keep a lookout for: ``The mob surrounded me and a machete smashed into my head.'' Just as Peterson intends, these exposures to war in Africa ``tear at your heart, and make you angry, very angry.'' (16-page color insert, not seen)-- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0415930634
• ISBN 13: 9780415930635
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400