Perseus Academic: Pity the Nation by Robert Fisk

Written by one of Britain's most distinguished journalists, this remarkable book is an epic account of the Lebanon conflict by an author who has personally witnessed the carnage of Beirut for twenty-six years. It is a story of Western betrayal and the challenge to American power and prestige in the Middle East. This book tells, too, in frightening detail, the story of the Middle East's first suicide bombers and their first devastating strike at Americans.

Through a combination of war reporting and political analysis, Robert Fisk describes Lebanon's ferocious civil war and subsequent Israeli invasions; the Lebanese militias, whose appalling brutality spared no one; the US Marines, who found themselves trapped in the horror of Lebanon, where many of them met a terrible fate; and the Israelis, who tried to install their own puppet rulers, and with their 1982 invasion provoked war crimes of their own. Fully updated to include the 2000 Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon and Ariel Sharon's electoral victory the following year, this American edition has sixty pages of new material and a revised preface.


Robert Fisk is Middle East Correspondent of the Independent, based in Beirut, and this highly acclaimed book is the fruit of twenty-six years' of reporting from Lebanon, where he covered the civil war and two Israeli invasions. Educated in Britain and Ireland, Fisk holds more journalism awards—twenty-four—than any other foreign correspondent for his reporting of the Iranian revolution and wars in Lebanon, the Persian Gulf, Kosovo and Algeria. He won the 2000 Amnesty International award for his reports from Serbia on NATO's bombardment of Yugoslavia and received the 2001 David Watt Memorial Award for his reporting from the Middle East.