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Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
Original language
English

MOST DANGEROUS, MOST UNMERCIFUL

J. Malcolm Garcia

Stories From Afghanistan

Reporting from Kabul and Kandahar between 2001 and 2015, J. Malcolm Garcia tells us what actually happened to the Afghan people as the conflict between first world nations and fundamentalists raged.

Here is Laila Haidary - everyone calls her "mother" - who, with no resources
to speak of, gives addicts living on the street one month of detoxification
and clean living, while at the same time sending her own children to make the
perilous journey to Western Europe as best they can. Here is nine-year-old
Ghani, who earns a few dollars a day collecting cans on the street to support his two brothers and sister now that his father has died of a brain tumor. Here are the translators and fixers Garcia hires, who are risking their lives working for foreigners against the warnings of the Taliban, and here also are the US soldiers who don't understand what their mission is here, and why they can't just do what they are trained to do, which is to seek out and kill the enemy.

J. Malcolm Garcia has been compared to the Russian writer Svetlana Alexievich,winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature, for how the voices of everyday people ring out in the stories he tells. Most Dangerous, Most Unmerciful is an essential work of literature that documents one of the true disasters of our age, at the same time as it celebrates the human endurance and ingenuity of the Afghans we meet in these pages, and affirms the role journalists can play to make sure their stories can be heard.
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Published 2022-07-01 by Seven Stories Press

Comments

It takes a unique combination of moral seriousness, physical courage and wild honesty to bear witness to war's devastation and be able to convey to those who weren't there what it was like. Lucky for us, J. Malcolm Garcia is such a writer. His tremendous book about ordinary Afghans trying to endure two decades of conflict and occupation deserves a wide readership. -- Matt Ga

J. Malcolm Garcia's Most Dangerous, Most Unmerciful is an unforgettable and harrowing collection of frontline dispatches from Afghanistan. As an experienced journalist, Garcia helps readers in the West to see this torn land anew, and his clear-eyed perception shines light upon a country and people that has remained largely invisible to American readers. These are vital and necessary stories that bring Afghanistan into focus. I'll never forget it. -- Patrick Hicks, author of The Commandant of Lubizec and In the Shadow of Dora