That’s actually where Schmidle starts his tale of the two years he spent immersing himself in Pakistan. Beginning in February 2006, Schmidle traveled throughout the country, learning Urdu and working to meet and interview radical Islamists and Taliban members and supporters. In January 2008, though, the police came to his home three times one day, the last time telling him his and his wife’s visas were revoked and they were to be taken to the airport immediately. A telephone call to a relatively well-placed acquaintance bought a brief delay but he also learned the government was upset about where he’d traveled, who he’d visited and some of his reporting. Schmidle bought the first two available seats on the next flight out.

To Live or to Perish Forever not only takes us with Schmidle into areas of internal strife and to meet the Taliban and its supporters, it gives a first hand recounting of the events that led to President Pervez Musharraf ‘s declaration of emergency rule in November 2007 and the protests and street battles that ultimately led to his impeachment and resignation in August 2008. (By coincidence, Schmidle briefly returned to Pakistan and was there when Musharraf resigned.) He became friends with Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the radical cleric who controlled the Red Mosque in Islamabad, and gives a firsthand account of the events leading to that and the military eventually storming the mosque. His efforts also pay some dividends in defeating the time lag element. Among the places he explored was the Swat area in northwestern Pakistan, the site of the Pakistani’s government’s recent offensive against Taliban control.

Taking its title from a famous 1933 pamphlet that first suggested the name “Pakistan,” the book illustrates much of the contrast in modern Pakistan today. In fact, even Schmidle being in Pakistan seems somewhat incongruous. While Schmidle was visiting northwestern Pakistan and other areas with a strong radical presence, his father was a Marine Corps general and his brother, a Marine lieutenant, was serving in Anbar Province in Iraq. But as To Live or to Perish Forever demonstrates, Pakistan itself is a world of contrasts.

One of the anomalies may just be the alliance between the U.S. and Pakistan. Schmidle notes that the Taliban operated freely in Pakistan because “everyone, everywhere in Pakistan, seemed to be offering [them] some help.” As one Pakistani journalist told him, “Ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent of Pakistanis, from their heart of hearts, are happy to see the Taliban creating problems for the Americans in Afghanistan and for Musharraf” in northwest Pakistan. But it is “the idea of the Taliban,” not the men with turbans and guns that infatuates them. “One hundred percent of the people don’t want the Taliban in Islamabad, Rawalpindi of even Karachi,” the country’s capital, military center and largest city, respectively, said the same journalist.

Schmidle, in fact, often encounters this type of antithesis firsthand. Perhaps the prime example is when he asked the leader of one of the two major pro-Taliban factions seeking to implement sharia law in the Swat Valley if he wanted to accompany Schmidle to see the leader of the other faction. “No way,” the faction leader said. “Those people are extremists.”

Schmidle’s efforts to visit and even attempt to understand the extremists as well as more unaligned and common Pakistanis helps make To Live or to Perish Forever useful for a Western reader. Yet there is an another aspect that makes it even more valuable. Despite being an American and offering articles to Western publications, Schmidle wanted to learn about all of Pakistan. That desire results in the reader also getting a broader and more accurate picture of the country and all its contrasts. To Live or to Perish Forever is not a Western-centric look but a reflection of actual immersion in Pakistani culture and politics. As a result, we see other fault lines in Pakistani society, as well as efforts to remedy those problems. We learn of different cultural and historical circumstances that have given rise to conflicts between regional and ethnic groups. These conflicts have not only led to struggles between the government and the regions for the exercise of authority but can also be reflected in how the country’s economic resources and development funds are allocated and spent.

As a result, while U.S. readers may be interested in Pakistan because of recent events, Schmidle helps give them a more authentic and discriminating look inside the country as a whole. The value of such an approach far outweighs any inherent problems in current affairs books, making To Live or to Perish Forever both timely and timeless.

Nicholas Schmidle, To Live or to Perish Forever

Technically, Johnston’s book doesn’t really fall into the “rush it to print” category, at least in the U.S. The title comes from his kidnapping by an extremist group in the Gaza Strip in March 2007, where he was stationed as a BBC correspondent. He was released in July 2007 after being held captive 114 days. Kidnapped: And Other Dispatches was published in Britain some four months later but is just now making its U.S. appearance. It is a worthy addition to the reportage about the Middle East as well as the war on terror not simply because of the recounting of his ordeal but his observations of and insight into conditions on the ground.

Johnston’s story of his kidnapping, in fact, doesn’t appear until near the end of the book’s section on the Middle East and, even then, it is relatively brief. A lengthier discussion of Johnston’s impressions of and from his kidnapping come in an interview conducted by another BBC correspondent several months after Johnston’s release. Preceding and following these are pieces Johnston did for the BBC’s From Our Own Correspondent program from the Middle East, Afghanistan and Central Asia.

It is almost eerie to read a piece Johnston wrote about 15 months before his own kidnapping about the increasing use of it as a tactic in Gaza. After explaining that the trend seemed to arise after the Israeli army pulled out, he notes that

the whole business of kidnapping goes very much against the local social grain. Palestinians are extremely hospitable people, and one of the dangers of being abducted here must be that you’ll get fed to death.

…. But of course being taken away by armed men is no joke. I dread it,… But if my turn does come I will be terrified. The trouble is, the fewer foreigners there are around, the greater the danger, and there are now very, very few foreigners in Gaza.

His “turn” came just 16 days before he was scheduled to leave Gaza. Taken by a group calling itself the Army of Islam, Johnston was told he was being held to obtain the release of Muslims being held in Britain. He had no pen, paper, book, radio or television (although the group later gave him a radio). Johnston was wearing disposable contacts that had to be thrown out his first day in captivity. Thus, it was in a “blurred, empty room [that] I began to try to come to terms with the disaster that had engulfed me.”

Although generally not maltreated, Kidnapped looks at a bigger internal danger, that of Johnston’s mental state. He found some solace in a perhaps unusual place. Thinking of the people diagnosed each year with terminal cancer, “I told myself it would be shameful if I couldn’t conduct myself with some grace int he face of my much lesser challenge.” He embarked on a variety of routines and mental exercises to combat the psychological dangers his experience presented. The radio also heartened him as he was able to hear his parents’ voices and the growing worldwide demands to free him. Ultimately, Johnston was rescued by Hamas, which had gained control of Gaza and wanted an end to the kidnapping. Thus, rather than government intervention, it was the act of another extremist organization that ended Johnston’s detention.

Beyond sharing those experiences, Johnston’s pieces on Gaza, Afghanistan and Central Asia provide first-hand insight into not only the problems that plague those regions but the people who live there. Johnston undoubtedly has a great deal of respect and even empathy for the Palestinians in Gaza. He examines how they cope with life in a place he describes as “battered, poverty-stricken and overcrowded” while being “short of money, short of space, short of hope.” Sadly, he observes, “it’s not short of guns.”

He displays a similar approach with Afghanistan, taking us not only from the internal strife but to the Bamiyan Buddhas both before and after they were destroyed and the experiences of the people. Likewise, his pieces on Central Asia look at peoples who are no longer controlled by the Soviet Union and are now trying to find their own way in the world.

Kidnapped could be criticized because most of it is years old now. Yet there seems to be some universal truths in it. Equally important, while his kidnapping helps provide this particular forum, Johnston commendably uses it to try to educate people about the places he worked, rather than broadly denounce nationalities due to the actions of a handful.

Alan Johnston, Kidnapped: And Other Dispatches

Originally published in 2002, Yalo is the fictional story of Daniel Yal’u, a Beirut native in his 20s repeatedly tortured while under arrest for rape and robbery. Going by the nickname that gives the book its title, he becomes almost a metaphor for Beirut as his torturers force him to write his life story. The torture and Yalo’s own internal strife produce a kaleidoscopic, at times hallucinatory, tale as his life is torn asunder physically and psychologically.

Yalo, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux, is not for everyone. While undoubtedly accurate (and even somewhat innovative), some of the torture scenes are graphic. More important, the book is not those who prefer a linear narrative. Yalo’s recounting of his life has loops within loops and at times contradictory flashbacks that run into and merge with each other. As Yalo, who tells most of his story in the third person, puts it, “Yalo was confused as to how he should organize his memory. He was confused because things came to him all at once and the images intermingled in his head, times overlapped in his consciousness, as if he were an old man.”

The rudiments of Yalo’s story are straightforward. Born in 1961, Yalo is raised by his mother and his grandfather, a Christian cleric. Yalo is in his teens when the Civil War breaks out and the family is forced to move from predominantly Muslim West Beirut to predominantly Christian East Beirut. A few years later, he joins “the Lebanese Forces,” most likely an Israeli-backed militia, where he serves as “a fighter” for 10 years. In 1989, he and an army buddy steal money and escape to Paris. Yalo’s friend abandons him, leaving him penniless and begging in Paris subway stations, where he is unable to speak the language. A Lebanese arms dealer comes across Yalo and brings him back to Lebanon to be a bodyguard for his family near a village outside Beirut. Yalo has an affair with his rescuer’s wife and then takes to robbing lovers in parked cars in the surrounding forest, occasionally raping the women. He falls in love with one of his victims, Shirin, and while it is unclear whether she also has an interest in him, she is the reason for his arrest and detention.

The torture is designed to not only obtain Yalo’s confession to rape and robbery, but to force him to admit involvement in a bombing plot. To avoid further torture, Yalo is required to write the story of his life. But what he writes is often unacceptable to his captors, resulting in more torture. The torture reaches the point “felt that time was frozen, and that I was living the last moments of my life; yet that my life was long — never-ending. I wanted it to end so that the pain would be over, but it stopped ending. That is eternity.”

In struggling to write his life story and avoid torture, Yalo examines the events of his life and that of his mother, the question of love and the events which led him to his present situation. The scenes are at times confusing. Did Shirin love him or was he simply stalking her? Which ruminations on who his father was are correct? Which recounting of his love affairs and his crimes are accurate? But, ultimately, the torture and the burden of coming to grips with and articulating his life become too much for Yalo.

You were wrong to ask him to write the story of his life. Yalo cannot write because he has gone to another place, where they do not write, where they have no need to write. I, Daniel, am writing, and will write everything you want about him and about me and about everyone. But Yalo, no. I want to be frank with you and say that Yalo left me and went far away. I am body and he is spirit. I suffer and he soars.

And to what conclusion does this suffering lead Daniel? “Yalo’s story, sir, has a name — war.”

Undoubtedly, the experiences of the Civil War, like the miasma of the prison cells and torture chambers, influence how Daniel/Yalu experiences and perceives the events of his life. Yet even that is too simplistic an answer. Yalo may well have been formed and he may seek to justify his action by the Civil War. But is the same true of Daniel? Are the events of childhood and struggles with the concept and meaning of love part of Daniel or Yalu? And how is Daniel different from Yalo? Or is he? And, ultimately, is he even capable of ever finding the answers to or in the story of his life? In fact, Khoury asks, “if I don’t find the end of the story, how will I be able to write it?”

It’s a question that applies equally to life, Lebanon’s experience and the Middle East as a whole. As such Yalo is as much a political novel as one that explores the human psyche and our capacity for both love and violence.

Elias Khoury, Yalo