The Last Correspondent: Anthony Shadid and the Search for Meaning in the Ruins of War
About this ebook
In the historic decade following 9/11, Anthony Shadid was the world’s most celebrated foreign correspondent and a uniquely perceptive interpreter of the Middle East. From the Iraq War to the upheavals of the Arab Spring, he wrote with empathy and literary power about the lives of ordinary people, producing moving and prescient dispatches for The Washington Post and The New York Times that foretold the disaster of the United States’ occupation of Iraq and the collapse of the old order across the Arab world.
Shadid’s own journey matched the drama and intrigue of the region he covered. Raised in the American heartland by wealthy Lebanese American parents, he reversed his family’s migration story, learning Arabic, changing the pronunciation of his last name, and setting out on a quest for home that, over the years, would lead him to reclaim his roots in his family’s ancestral town in southern Lebanon.
Shadid’s pioneering journalism took him to the darkest corners of the Middle East and came at a tremendous cost: He was shot in Palestine, was captured and beaten in Libya, and, on the long night of February 16, 2012, died while being smuggled out of Syria during the country’s brutal civil war. The absence of his voice, calling attention to humanity in the ruins of war, continues to be felt in the conflicts roiling places such as Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran.
In The Last Correspondent, two of Shadid’s closest colleagues tell the story of his life and tragic death in cinematic and unforgettable detail—a story as dramatic as any Shadid wrote.
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About the author
Philip Bennett has been a foreign correspondent, newspaper editor, and documentary film producer. He was an international editor and managing editor of The Washington Post and a correspondent in Latin America for The Boston Globe. He has coproduced more than twenty documentary films for the PBS series Frontline, and is the recipient of an Emmy Award and a New America ASU Future Security fellowship. His journalism career started at The Lima Times in Peru.
Steve Fainaru has worked as an investigative reporter, foreign correspondent, and sportswriter. His awards include the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting and an Emmy for Outstanding Sports Journalism. He is the author of three books, including the New York Times bestseller League of Denial, written with his brother, Mark Fainaru-Wada. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, writer Maureen Fan.
