Thought Patterns
by Emanuel
This daunting 1,100+ page book had been on my bookshelf ever since I had bought it in early 2006, only a few months after its release, and it was patiently waiting for me to give it the attention it surely deserved since Robert Fisk had poured his 25+ years of Middle-East war reporting into it. Yet, to approach a piece of work of this scope, one must prepare himself; not necessarily due to the extent of ‘The Great War for Civilisation‘ but mainly because of the breadth of its content. From the turn of the 20th century Armenian genocide through Lebanon’s civil war and both recent Afghan conflicts to all three of the Iraq wars as well as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Fisk proposes to take us, the reader, into history and as close to the battlefield we’ll most likely ever get.
Not one simple review could capture all but a minuscule portion of what this brilliant tome has to offer since it is a grandiose book on many levels. Robert Fisk, one of the world’s best-known journalists, and perhaps infamously to some because he has interviewed bin Laden more than once and was among the rare few to write after 9/11 that, although condemnable, these attacks were surely the results of the United States’ Middle-Eastern foreign policies. Surely controversial at the time, now that the debacles of both US invasions are painstakingly obvious, his views are more widely accepted. Nonetheless, ‘Fisk’s ability to arouse the ire of political conservatives has led the blogosphere to spawn the term fisking.’
This is a book about war, or more precisely about wars, and the author, according to a review published in the Independent, the same newspaper he writes for,
believes that most journalists who have reported from the tragedy-strewn and bloody countries of the Middle East have failed their readers and viewers. He has decided that they have been competent – even outstanding – in giving the who, how, where, what and when of events but have left out the “why”.
Robert Fisk takes the time to paint the historical context for these conflicts and intertwines history with his political analysis, giving ‘The Great War for Civilisation: the Conquest of the Middle-East’ its particular depth, which combined with the multitude of personal anecdotes from 25+ years on the front-line, results in a unique reading adventure.
The size of the book might be intimidating but once I sunk my teeth into it, I did not want it to end, and surely that speaks volumes, pun intended, of how passionate and colorful Fisk’s investigative reporting is.
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Helene Allard
quel talent evident……un plaisir de te lire et le gout de lire le livre merci et a+