The Lion's Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan

by JonLeeAnderson (Author), ThomasDworzak (Photographer)

• New

  Paperback
  2003

  $17.10

  New Yorker staff writer Jon Lee Anderson arrived in Afghanistan to report for the magazine ten days before U.S. bombers began pounding Al Qaeda and Taliban forces. His dispatches provide an unprecedented and riveting on-the-ground account of the Afghan conflict, and his e-mails to the magazine selections of which frame the pieces here paint a vivid behind-the-scenes portrait of war journalism. From the battle for the Taliban bastion of Kunduz and the interim government's clumsy takeover of Kabul, to the search for Osama bin Laden in the Tora Bora caves and the truth of Al Qaeda's assassination of charismatic Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud two days before September 11, 2001 Anderson offers an unprecedented look into the forces that shape the conflict and the players who may threaten Afghanistan's future. In the distinguished tradition of New Yorker war reporting, The Lion's Grave illuminates a region to which we will be inextricably bound for some time to come.

• Used

  Paperback
  2002

  $3.47

  Two weeks after the terrorist attacks of 11 September, Jon Lee Anderson became one of the first Western journalists to gain access to Afghanistan. Even for a seasoned reporter, the situation was unexpectedly dangerous - there were no clearly demarcated front lines, no electricity or phone lines, and the roads were full of mines and bandits. Anderson stayed in Afghanistan for months, filing first-hand reports for New Yorker on the high-technology conflict in a feudal terrain. The Lion's Grave brings together these stories, supplemented by vivid unpublished e-mail accounts that transport the reader on to the ground and into the process of war journalism. Anderson reports from the intriguing court of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the deposed but still-official president of Afghanistan; he witnesses the fall of Kunduz, one of the last Taliban bastions; and he finds evidence that the Taliban were not the austere, self-abnegating men they claimed to be. The Lion's Grave also includes a previously unpublished account of the urgent search for Osama bin Laden in the caves of Tora Bora. It is destined to become a classic.