May 23, 2016
In this harrowing account of the Syrian Civil War, Italian journalist Borri describes the grim year she spent in Aleppo, having arrived a year after the 2011 uprising began. The book is less a narrative of Bashar al-Assad's vicious war than Borri's personal odyssey. The battlefront divided Aleppo, a city of over two million, and remains despite repeated offensives. Assad's forces possess overwhelming heavy artillery and aircraft, but they are too inaccurate to target the front, so they concentrate on the historicânow largely ruinedâcity. Borri was embedded with the Free Syrian Army, dodging bullets and mortar attacks, interviewing soldiers before their deaths, and describing the unspeakable suffering of civilians. She writes of distrusting and despising other Western journalists, themselves well-fed and yearning for human-interest stories to entertain their privileged and distant audiences. Yet Borri cannot avoid indulging in the same, for instance with her tale of a female rebel sniper. There is good journalism here, which falls under the heading of an intrepid reporter going to war: a vivid, but often impressionisticâeven stream-of-consciousnessâaccount of death-defying adventures on Syrian battlefields during which Borri shares the miseries of her subjects and the terrible destruction and loss.