Books
Bittersweet: Lessons from my Mother's Kitchen
Bittersweet will be published in the Spring of 2010 by Bloomsbury in the UK. Also available direct from Bloomsbury
Bittersweet: Lessons from my Mother's Kitchen
(Published in the US April 14, 2009)
The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 (Contributor)
Winner, Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2002, Non-Fiction
Beyond the Mountains of the Damned
Winner, Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2002, Non-Fiction
ReviewsWashington Post
In badly constructed books, the reader doesn't care what happens on the next page. In well-constructed books, the reader can't wait to see what happens on the next page. This book is a rare, third kind: The reader dreads what will happen on the next page. Nevertheless, he feels compelled to read on. . . . McAllester takes the reader not only along the streets where atrocities have been committed but inside homes while they are happening. As is the case with many good reads, the power of such scenes comes from the order in which events are presented. First the author develops a character, then later in the book informs you about his fate. Or the author will describe how a family is brutalized, then describes, almost as an aside -- in the course of a succeeding chapter about his own adventures in war-torn Kosovo -- how he meets a traumatized eyewitness to the previous account. In this way, the reader becomes an observer not only of what was happening inside Kosovo during the NATO bombardment but of what was happening to McAllester himself and how he managed to assemble his book.The power of McAllester's extraordinary book lies not in its comprehensiveness or its literary polish-though there are many brilliantly moving and perceptive passages-but in its shocking authenticity and deep moral concern. One gets the sense that he risked his life not simply to pursue a story, timely and important as it was, but because of the enormity of the evil being done and his conviction that, in a world of bland policy abstractions, what happened in those days inside Kosovo had to be told.McAllester powerfully concludes that a sickening mixture of greed, ethnic hostility, and wartime nihilism has displaced the healing power for love and reconciliation for the forseeable future. One of the most thoughtful accounts of the conflict in Kosovo to date conveyed with taut journalistic clarity that should ensure the book a broad range of readers.This account is not of the 'virtual war' that Westerners saw on their television screens but of the real effects on people who consider the ravaged area home.McAllester's spare, understated prose is potent as is his exploration of the human side of geopolitics and war.In a twist that took McAllester as much by surprise as it will the reader, it appears that Isa Bala lived in that ill-defined world too, a world where people make deals and concessions just to survive another day. Perhaps he believed that through such compromises, his family would be safe. if so, he was tragically wrong.Beyond the Mountains of the Damned is a gripping, if depressing, account of what McAllester found among the ruins. . . . There is no bravado. . . . He offers vivid thumbnail sketches of Kosovar warriors in the field.McAllester offers us the kind of specific detail that we need to make other people's lives human to us. Even more importantly, he tells us how it is to be the oppressor, or at least one of the minions of the oppressors
See what people are saying about Beyond the Mountains of the Damned on Goodreads.com
"A heart-rending tale of the execution of innocents, told with eloquence and compassion by a brilliant and courageous young journalist...What makes this a path-breaking account is the author's drive to find the sadistic killers who shot children in cold blood, and his insistence that they explain their crime. The story is unforgettable."
- Roy Gutman, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of A Witness to Genocide
"To write this book, Matt McAllester walked through mountains covered with snow and hatred, with rifle shots aimed at him from above. He wrote it with extraordinary talent that is equal to his bravery."
- Jimmy Breslin
"Beyond the Mountains of the Damned is about how war destroys society at its most basic level. I read this and understood what happened to ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances during those dark and desperate days in Kosovo. It is a book I will not forget."
- Janine di Giovanni, contributing editor for Vanity Fair and author of The Place at the End of the World
"Matthew McAllester tells the searing and disturbing story of the war in Kosovo. He explains clearly, as few have, what happened and why, and why it matters. His powerful narrative takes us down roads, past checkpoints, and into battle zones, and it plunges us into strange, sad, scarred places where no other reporter has gone. The book has a drive and a momentum that keep you reading even when the sheer horror and stupidity of events is painful. A human as well as a historic tale, told with an eye and an ear for the personal, the individual, the intimiate."
- Amy Wilentz, author of Martyr's Crossing and I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen.
Reviews:Soon after bombs began falling on Baghdad, Newsday reporter McAllester was seized by agents from Saddam Hussein's security service and taken to the most feared place in Iraq: Abu Ghraib prison. McAllester was stripped, interrogated, given a pair of filthy pajamas and left alone in a tiny cell to agonize about his fate. Eight days later, with as little explanation as he received upon his arrest, McAllester was taken to the Jordanian border and released. Shortly thereafter, he returned to Iraq to try to get some answers. A riveting account of one man's frightening ordeal, this book is also an indictment of decades of oppression by Iraq's fallen dictator. McAllester examines Abu Ghraib's history (the prison was designed by an American company), interviews some of its victims (including a U.S. citizen imprisoned unjustly for seven years) and catalogues its horrors (torture, rape and execution). In one of the book's most affecting episodes, McAllester tracks down his own interrogator at Abu Ghraib, the man who decided whether he would live or die. McAllester admits he betrayed his Iraqi driver under questioning (it was "a calculated risk, ringed with cowardice"); he also acknowledges that journalists during Saddam's rule were tainted by collaborating with the regime (it was a "dirty, self-compromising process," he writes). He is similarly blunt in his assessment of the postwar occupation, which, he says, is undermined by poor planning and a lack of understanding of the Iraqi people. A Pulitzer-winning reporter with experience in numerous international hotspots, McAllester has produced a fascinating look at life in one of the most repressive regimes on earth. 16 pages of color photos not seen by PW.
© Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.In late March 2003, as American bombs blasted away at Iraq, Matthew McAllester, a 33-year-old British citizen reporting for Newsday, the Long Island newspaper, was arrested at his hotel in Baghdad by Iraqi security agents and taken to the prison known as Abu Ghraib. They also arrested and imprisoned Moises Saman, a Spanish photographer working with him, and a couple of other journalists whom he scarcely knew. Though no clear explanation was given, "I knew there could be only one reason we had been arrested: the Iraqi authorities suspected us of being spies." The place where they were taken was "the last circle in every Iraqi's hell," its "eerie" name translated as "Father of the Strange." Understandably, McAllester was terrified:
"The prison looked so poorly protected, so easily accessible, for a place with such a horrifying reputation for keeping men inside for decades, for torturing and executing prisoners without recourse to any normal concept of law. Here was a prison where healthy men would beg tuberculosis patients to spit into their mouths so that they could contract the disease and get a comfortable bed in the tuberculosis ward. Inside these walls was a system of spying and paranoia and punitive violence that was a distillation of the society that lay beyond the walls. But like the Iraqi security agencies' nondescript detention centers all over the country, there was very little to indicate that Abu Ghraib was anything particularly remarkable. Even the multicolored portrait of Saddam to the left of the entranceway was relatively modest in comparison to many of the vast murals and statues in Baghdad."
McAllester expected to be interrogated, tortured and killed. As it turned out, only the first of these occurred, and even that was conducted mildly by the standards of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. He was not abused physically, and he was fed adequately, if not generously. After barely a week he and his fellow prisoners were released, as inexplicably as they had been arrested. By contrast with those who had spent years in Abu Ghraib, or who had been executed there, he and his fellow detainees got off ridiculously lightly, as McAllester seems to understand.
Still and, again, understandably, it was a traumatic experience that seems to have left a permanent mark on him. During his period of captivity, he had plenty of time to think about what was happening to him. "It's pretty easy to see the misery of refugees from Kosovo, Afghanistan, or Palestine," he writes, "but it's another thing to have experienced what they have experienced. I've never had a parent blown up on a bus. I've never had a sister killed because she was from the wrong religion or ethnic group. But I realized that I was now experiencing powerlessness, the prospect of violent death, and the deprivation of freedom. And I decided that should I get out of this place alive, I would not forget those feelings when I went back to work."
Blinded by the Sunlight is McAllester's attempt to get those experiences and feelings down on paper. Some may feel that eight days in prison don't add up to enough raw material for a book, and indeed there are times when one gets the feeling that McAllester is going a bit overboard with padding. But as memories start to fade a year after the American invasion of Iraq, it is useful to be reminded that Saddam Hussein's regime was every bit as heinous as apologists for that invasion insisted.
When large men with threatening manners came to his hotel room in the middle of the night, McAllester told them that "this is a terrible, stupid war," but in truth he "believed that this was a necessary war, a war fought on false pretexts but one that would finally rid Iraq of the kind of men who knocked on doors at one in the morning and gave no answers." After his ordeal was over and he returned to Baghdad to observe "clueless" American soldiers bungling the occupation, he reflected further. He had "wanted the war so that more than 23 million people would not have to live in the fear that I first scented in 2001 and tasted more strongly inside Abu Ghraib," but not a war based on the "lie" that the United States "was afraid of Saddam's military capabilities or his alleged links to terrorism." He continues:
"If the war had been fought on the grounds of human rights and moral obligation, Iraq and the United States would be less likely to be facing the potential catastrophe of suspicion and violence that threatened post-Saddam Iraq. First of all, the message to the Iraqi people would have been clear and consistent: We are coming to save you. Second, the invading powers might have made an effort not only to plan a highly flexible war strategy but to plan a highly flexible peace strategy. They had months to do so and simply messed it up. It was not a priority. The Bush administration planned a brilliant war and neglected to prepare properly for what came next."
Though certain particulars of this argument are debatable -- waging a war on purely moral grounds is a tricky business, and selling such a war at home and abroad is even trickier -- McAllester has earned both his loathing for Saddam's regime and his skepticism about American motives and planning. Along with a few other Western journalists, he stayed in Baghdad after the fighting began, because he thought it important to understand what it was like for "Iraqis on the receiving end of the American-led attack." As he told his interrogator at Abu Ghraib: "We felt a strong moral duty to be in Baghdad to cover the war from here, from inside Iraq. We pushed the limits and broke some rules. And I am very sorry that we did. But we did it so that our newspaper could offer its hundreds of thousands of readers an accurate perspective of the war and of the Iraqi people."
McAllester had been in Iraq off and on for a couple of years before the bombing began. "I've been to a few oppressive countries," he writes, "including the horrifying Burma, but nothing I have ever experienced touched the total control and fear exerted by Saddam's regime." Americans who have doubts about that -- and, incredibly, there are still Americans who do -- would do well to read his detailed accounts of the fear that pervaded every corner of that unhappy nation for some three decades. There are moments in Blinded by the Sunlight when one can almost literally feel that fear, which is a handy corrective to the argument that things really weren't that bad after all.
As one example there is the story of Saad Jassim, who had gone to the United States two decades earlier, married an American woman, taken American citizenship, and become known as Sam Jason. He visited Iraq in 1990, setting off a chain of unhappy events that included a divorce from his wife, to whom he was devoted, and arrest, and "four and a half months of torture and dehumanization" before being incarcerated at Abu Ghraib. The torture, which McAllester describes with unsparing detail, could have broken him yet somehow did not, but McAllester's account is evidence enough of the pointless cruelty that was daily reality in Saddam's absurd government.
Blinded by the Sunlight is in this and other ways a powerful book, yet it's also an oddly constructed one. If it has any narrative cohesion, I was unable to detect it. McAllester wanders this way and that, paying almost no attention to chronology, backing and filling to no apparent purpose. This makes at times for maddening reading, but overall it's worth the effort.
-© 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.Using his brief incarceration in an Iraqi prison as a focal point, a journalist narrates a harrowing first-person account of life in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Held for eight days on suspicion of being an American spy, McAllester returned to Iraq after the collapse of Saddam's regime to search for his captors. Together with his own personal recollections of his imprisonment, he interweaves the larger story of a nation held in a different type of captivity for more than two decades. As McAllester struggled to cope with the trauma of his ordeal and unexpected release, so too did an Iraqi people suddenly liberated by the swift collapse of Hussein's brutal dictatorship. Linking one man's search for answers with a nation's struggle for identity, this reflective chronicle is certain to be an immediate best-seller.
© American Library Association. All rights reserved.McAllester builds his book around a single stroke of very bad luck -- his detention for eight days in Abu Ghraib, Iraq's most notorious prison, by paranoid authorities who'd become convinced he was a spy. The episode is the departure point for fascinating encounters afterward with his jailer, his interrogator and his fellow inmates, some of whom had languished in Abu Ghraib for years, suffering terrible torture along the way. Their stories are revealing windows onto the machinations of horror.
In discussing himself, McAllester's best quality is his disarming honesty. He is his own harshest critic. For all his daring escape fantasies, he freely admits to a willingness to tell his interrogators whatever it took to win release, even if it meant betraying his Iraqi driver, a man who had bravely done things on McAllester's behalf that could have easily resulted in his own death or imprisonment, especially if Saddam had held onto power much longer.
Blinded is sometimes difficult to read - not because of style, for the author is a skilled writer - but because of difficult content. McAllester seriously tries to comprehend the Iraqi mind. The reader cannot be expected to absorb Blinded in a single sitting. It is better to take time out to review mentally the incidents as the author describes them. McAllester's effort is to bring Americans around to learn to think like the Iraqi.McAllester examines the suffering of the Iraqis under Saddam through the lens of his eight days in the infamous penitentiary Abu Ghraib. Fortunately for McAllester, his hard time was, by Iraqi standards, nothing to write home about (no beatings, no physical torture), and he acknowledges this at length, almost guiltily. And if McAllester's self-lacerating confessionals ("I don't do this job to help people... I do it to satisfy some...selfish urge to taste death...") aren't all germane to the plight of long-oppressed Iraqis, they certainly serve a powerful thesis: "When the trauma is the size of a nation, it may linger and erupt again for generations to come.""Blinded by the Sunlight" recounts McAllester's eight days in Abu Ghraib, Iraq's most fearsome prison. It's a hair-raising story, but the book would be little more than a footnote to the war without McAllester's journalistic instincts. By refusing to make the story solely his own, by seeking out Iraqis who were trapped in the nightmare of Hussein's rule - jailer and prisoner, torturer and tortured, killer and corpse - McAllester reveals the degradation suffered by ordinary human beings at the hands of the Baathist regime. The metaphor employed throughout the book is of Iraq as one giant prison, filled with informants and spies and haunted by a corrosive paranoia....
Iraq is traumatized by decades of brutality, riven with ethnic divisions and spooked by a pervasive history of betrayal, not only of citizen by citizen, but of the entire country by every outside force to have occupied it. "Behind the different coats of politics and pain, Iraq has a solidity and pride that will see it through these hard times," McAllester writes, in what sounds like a dubious stab at optimism. The rest of this fine book reveals just how difficult Iraq's future will be.
The book includes more than the story of Mr. McAllester's detention. He met many victims of the regime: e.g., Saad Jassim, a U.S. citizen who had been held for seven years in Iraq's prisons for being a spy (he was not). But as Mr. McAllester notes, it was ordinary Iraqis who were victimized most of all -- forced to live in fear, inform on friends, keep secrets from neighbors and make compromising decisions that now haunt them.A penetrating record of the last days of Saddam's Iraq. Newsday correspondent McAllester (Beyond the Mountains of the Damned, 2002) came to Baghdad under the burden of fate-tempting restrictions: "Unable to obtain regular journalist visas, we had entered Iraq on journalists-with-human-shields visas, which only allowed us to cover the activities of the peace activists who said they were determined to bunk down at facilities such as hospitals and schools in the hope of preventing bombing attacks." No story there, of course, so McAllester and his surfer-dude photographer wander through the glowing streets of the capital in the wake of the Allies' air assaults, looking for the Big Story. The snippets that make their way into these pages are fascinating: Uday Hussein's unhappiness over "the accurate American targeting of his real estate," a door-to-door search for a downed American pilot, the gloomy certainty of Iraqi dissidents that the American assault would be half-hearted and that Saddam would remain in power. McAllester's narrative takes a darker twist when, soon after the bombs begin to fall, he is arrested on suspicion of espionage and spirited away to Abu Ghraib, Iraq's worst prison. His imprisonment and interrogation were far less than homegrown opponents of the regime had to endure, of course-as McAllester writes, "my eight days of incarceration barely registered on [one longtime prisoner's] scale of suffering." Still, they were plenty bad, even though he had prepared for the eventuality by having taken a survival-in-hostile-conditions course a few months earlier. ("Be worried if your captors let you see their faces," he writes. "That means they might already be planning to kill you.I could see their faces.") Freed a few days before the Marines arrived in Baghdad, McAllester enjoys a rare moment: the chance to confront one of his captors, who calmly explains that he was just doing his job in a country that, as McAllester portrays it, was itself one big prison. A memorable addition to the literature of modern war.Through a careful narrative that weaves his personal story with the wider story of Iraqis inside Abu Ghraib and outside under Saddam, and through dogged reporting on all fronts, McAllester manages to unlock the history behind Abu Ghraib.
He breaks through walls of secrecy and fear and shame to interview the torturers and the tortured.
He writes poignantly of his own return to Abu Ghraib in the days after the ''liberation" of Iraq, of his interviews with men who spent years, lifetimes inside its walls.
He also chronicles his determined search for his interrogator, and his desire to turn the tables and interrogate him about his crimes.
McAllester also journeys far beyond the walls of Abu Ghraib in reporting out his broader theme that the prison itself stood as a metaphor for life under Saddam and in this sense offers readers an assessment of the fate of postwar Iraq.
But the real strength of this book, the thing that sets it apart from other books published about the war and a long list of others still forthcoming, comes when McAllester keeps the lens of his reporting focused tightly on Abu Ghraib itself.
Some compelling examples are the detailed history of the prison, including the haunting fact that the very locks that keep the prisoners in their cells were made by an American firm from Long Island at a time when the United States saw the regime in Baghdad as a de facto ally.
All of these shards of fact are what make this book valuable reading amid the ongoing abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib for anyone who should choose to learn more about this black hole of Iraqi history into which the American forces have so clumsily managed to fall.
See what people are saying about Blinded by the Sunlight on Goodreads.com
"A grippingly honest, well-told account of the author's wartime imprisonment in Saddam's most ghoulish prison (and of his return to track down and face his captors), this book is also a compassionate guide to the fractured psyches of Iraqis today. If you wish to understand why Iraq after Saddam is not an easy place to put back together again, then you must read this compelling book."
- Jon Lee Anderson, New Yorker Staff Writer and author of The Lion's Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan and The Fall of Baghdad
"More than any of the other reporters who covered the last day of Saddam Hussein's brutal rule in Iraq, Matt McAllester has earned the right to write with passion about that terrible regime. In this book, McAllester takes us with him into the grim fortress of Abu Ghraib - the heart of Saddam's darkness, the charnel house where Hussein murdered tens of thousands of his fellow Iraqis. His book is a powerful testament for all the victims of Saddam."
- John F. Burns, New York Times Chief Foreign Correspondent
"A brilliant reporter, Matt McAllester takes us through the looking glass into Baghdad's most feared prison to offer a captivating, intimate look at Iraq before, during, and after the war. His haunting insights deserve the attention of all Americans."
- Anne Garrels, NPR Senior Foreign Correspondent and author of Naked in Baghdad
"The Mammoth Book of War Correspondents." Robinson 2001. (Contributor)
"Best Newspaper Writing 1997." Bonus Books. (Contributor)
"Rethink: Causes and Consequences of September 11." de-Mo 2004. (Contributor)
"This is War: A Witness to Man's Destruction." Charta 2004. Photography book by Moises Saman. (Essay)
Essay on war for a book accompanying an exhibition of contemporary art called "System Error: War is a force that gives us meaning" at the Palazzo della Papesse Contemporary Art Institution, Siena, Italy. Feb 2007.