May 9, 2011 Issue

A New Yorker without a book review is like a pastrami sandwich without hot mustard, a mojito without mint, tiramisù without the cognac. The book review is a key ingredient of the magazine’s “signature mix”; when it’s absent, as it is this week, I feel cheated. But I soon get over it, usually when I find myself immersed in an inspired feature, as I did this week, in Jon Lee Anderson’s “Sons of the Revolution.” What a terrific piece of reportage! Anderson seems to thrive on chaos. He has a knack of making contact with articulate, English-speaking individuals who are directly impacted on a survival level by the events he’s covering, e.g., Nadia François, in earthquake-ravaged Port-au-Prince (“Neighbor’s Keeper,” The New Yorker, February 8, 2010), and binding their experiences into his narrative core. In “Sons of the Revolution,” the central figure is Osama ben Sadik, a volunteer ambulance driver, who, during the time Anderson is with him, suffers the tragic loss of his oldest son, Muhannad, in the war with Qaddafi’s soldiers. Anderson’s style could be described as first-person descriptive analysis. It’s tremendously effective; it puts you right in the thick of things. Yet, it also pulls back now and then and gives you a glimpse of the big picture. For example, in “Sons of the Revolution,” he says, “As Qaddafi’s Army advanced, a number of Libyans told me that, if Benghazi fell, they would retreat to the Green Mountains, east of the city, to fight a guerrilla war.” Anderson uses his mention of “Green Mountains” to trace the chain of events that led to Qaddafi’s dictatorship. It must be tremendously difficult for a foreign correspondent to find his or her focus in such a welter of information, much of it conflicting, that a revolution or a war or a natural disaster throws up. But Anderson always seems to pull it off. His “Sons of the Revolution” goes straight into my personal anthology of great reportage literature.