Robert Nickelsberg, a Time magazine contract photographer for 25 years, first entered Afghanistan in 1988 by crossing the border from Pakistan with mujahideen. He returned frequently. Afghanistan: A Distant War [Prestel, October] collects 150 of his color photographs spanning 25 years from before the Soviet withdrawal through the shrinking U.S. presence.
Nickelsberg, an OPC board member, covered the collapse of the Soviet-backed regime in 1992 and the civil war that followed. He witnessed the Taliban’s conquest, its fall to the U.S.-led invasion in 2011 and its return to power. The book includes his own insightful commentary and essays by Jon Lee Anderson, Steve Coll, Tim McGirk and others.
Near the beginning of the book, a Soviet soldier sits atop a flower-bedecked armored vehicle in May 1988 and shakes the hand of an Afghan soldier as the Soviets begin to withdraw. Near the end, two lines of American soldiers pass each other one in May 2013: a bareheaded group soberly facing the camera are going home and the other, walking in the opposite direction, are helmeted replacements. In between, Nickelsberg, who has a reputation for being fearless, captured images of the seemingly never-ending conflict in the country with men fighting, injured and dead.
Away from battlefields, Nickelsberg portrays poverty, oppression and politics: April 1989, military cadets hold roses aloft to celebrate the 11th anniversary of the Afghan Communist Party’s seizure of power; April 1992, Ahmed Shah Massoud, the mujahideen commander assassinated by Al Qaeda in September 2001, talks to journalists after a historic meeting of opposition leaders; April 1992, Hamid Karzai translates for President Sibghatullah Mojaddedi; March 1993, armed guards block women from supplies of flour during a food shortage; January 1995, destroyed laboratory equipment and books at a school in an area controlled by the Taliban; October 2004, a man votes in the country’s first presidential election, where despite allegations of fraud Karzai was declared winner; April 2009, men rally in support of a law with a provision declaring “a wife shall fulfill the sexual desires of her husband.”
Nickelsberg’s knowledge of Afghanistan earned over time and with on-the-ground reporting gives a rare depth to his photos and commentary.
NORTH AMERICA
Jim Lehrer‘s 21st novel was inspired by conversation he had in November 1963 as a reporter assigned to the Dallas airport to cover President John F. Kennedy’s arrival and departure but instead wrote about Kennedy’s death. Lehrer worked for the Dallas Times-Herald, an afternoon paper where a rewrite reporter said it would help him on deadline later if Lehrer could tell him if the presidential limousine would have a plexiglass bubble top during the motorcade. Kennedy was known to dislike the top, which protected against bad weather, not bullets.
It had rained that morning and the bubble was on the limo waiting at the airport. Lehrer talked to a Secret Service agent, who used a two-way radio to check on the weather downtown. The agent decided the top should be removed. Top Down [Random House, October] is Lehrer’s fictional exploration of what that decision meant to Kennedy, a Secret Service agent and Jack Gilmore, an ambitious young reporter at Love Field that day.
Did the decision doom the president? Might Lee Harvey Oswald have thought the top was bulletproof? Would he have held his fire? Or would he have shot anyway, shattering glass into shards that would have killed everyone in the car?
Five years after the assassination, the agent’s daughter calls Gilmore. He reluctantly agrees to her demand to speak “off the record – way, way off the record.” Her father, racked by guilt, has lost the will to live. She wants to reenact the shooting at a secluded estate to show what would have happened if the bubble top had remained. And, she wants his help.
Lehrer draws on his experience in Dallas to tell the story, largely through the voice of Gilmore. At the end, Gilmore says: “For me, the fragility of what we all come to think of as order and normality has been the permanent lesson of the Kennedy assassination. Since that awful day we’ve known we are always only three shots away from chaos.”
THE FRONTLNES
Two recent books give tribute to Marie Colvin, the veteran American war correspondent who worked for the Sunday Times of London. She and French photojournalist Remi Ochlik died in February 2012 while covering the civil war in Syria when a makeshift press center in Homs was shelled in what was seen as a government attack targeting journalists.
On the Front Line: The Collected Journalism of Marie Colvin [Harper Collins, October] is a showcase for about 100 of Colvin’s dispatches beginning with the 1986 U.S. bombing of Libya and ending with her last assignment in Syria.
Colvin covered wars but focused on noncombatants and ordinary people. She writes about an Iraqi tortured into having cosmetic surgery to become Uday Hussein’s body double, a girl in Kosovo who finds the remains of her family in plastic bags, desperate women and children in East Timor fighting through razor wire to seek sanctuary in a U.N. compound, and a Libyan soldier who describes how he and his comrades carried out an order to rape four sisters. Her refusal to leave East Timor in 1999 helped shame the U.N. into staying and the international community into forcing the Indonesians to give refugees safe passage.
She writes of crossing the freezing Chechen mountains and reports from the strongholds of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka where shrapnel destroyed the sight in her left eye.
In Under the Wire: Witnessing War with Marie Colvin [Weinstein Books, October], Paul Conroy gives an account of his last assignment with Colvin. Conroy, a photographer, and Colvin reported from war zones around the world. He has written a vivid and moving account of their friendship and the last year they spent together.
Conroy’s description of how he, Colvin and other journalists moved around Syria when it was impossible to know who to trust detail the risks and challenges of reporting on the civil war there. He tells how he and Colvin were smuggled into the country and crawled through a claustrophobic, muddy tunnel toward rebel-held Homs. Conroy, a former British soldier, knew it was dangerous. As Colvin’s reports from Homs shocked the world, they became trapped in a hellish place. Heavy artillery fire rained down, killing and maiming hundreds of civilians. The rocket that killed Colvin blew a hole in Conroy’s thigh big enough to put his hand through. His evacuation after five days of blood loss, pain and dwindling supplies is a harrowing account.
Acknowledging his friend as someone whose “reputation as a hard-arsed war reporter – one of the toughest, best and bravest of our time – preceded her,” Conroy said Colvin had a “superb sense of the absurd” as well as an “easy-going manner and effortless charm.” Most of all, he said, she believed in the power and responsibility of journalists to hold governments accountable and to be a “witness to the plight of ordinary civilians.”