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    Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War
    Unavailable
    Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War
    Unavailable
    Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War
    Audiobook11 hours

    Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War

    Written by Megan K. Stack

    Narrated by Dana Green

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    A shattering account of war and disillusionment from a young woman reporter on the front lines of the war on terror.

    A few weeks after the planes crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11, journalist Megan K. Stack, a  twenty-five-year-old national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, was thrust into Afghanistan and Pakistan, dodging gunmen and prodding warlords for information. From there, she traveled to war-ravaged Iraq and Lebanon and other countries scarred by violence, including Israel, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, witnessing the changes that swept the Muslim world and laboring to tell its stories.

    Every Man in This Village Is a Liar is Megan K. Stack's riveting account of what she saw in the combat zones and beyond. She relates her initial wild excitement and her slow disillusionment as the cost of violence outweighs the elusive promise of freedom and democracy. She reports from under bombardment in Lebanon; records the raw pain of suicide bombings in Israel and Iraq; and, one by one, marks the deaths and disappearances of those she interviews.

    Beautiful, savage, and unsettling, Every Man in This Village Is a Liar is a memoir about the wars of the  twenty-first century that readers will long remember.


    From the Hardcover edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJun 15, 2010
    ISBN9780307736000
    Unavailable
    Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War
    Author

    Megan K. Stack

    Megan K. Stack is the author of Every Man in This Village Is a Liar, which was a finalist for America’s 2010 National Book Award and an Australian bestseller. She reported on war for the Los Angeles Times from dozens of countries, and was most recently Moscow bureau chief. She was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in international reporting.

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    Reviews for Every Man in This Village is a Liar

    4/5

    54 ratings13 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Wow. Megan Stack was a finalist in 2007 for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. After reading this book, I am not surprised she was a finalist, only that she didn't win. She has fearlessly taken on a subject of great world controversy sparing no danger to herself both physically and mentally. Her writing is stunningly beautiful and poetic. It is also clear, explicitly honest, and heartbreakingly blunt.This is not a book about one experience in one country. It covers several countries in the Middle East region over a critical timeframe. Each chapter is a definitive account of a different country with her analysis of the situation as she was able to absorb and interpret what she saw and heard. Stack cuts to the heart of the problems, exposes the beauty and the ugliness of humanity, and holds up a mirror for Americans to see the reflection of their own policies and actions in this war.The tension and fear never let up. The realities of living in the midst of war hit the reader like the bombs that were dropped on villages of the innocent. Words on a page are never the same as real life experience. But this book is truly "an education in war" (as the title proclaims) to a nation that is far removed from its everyday horror and we had best pay attention. Everyone should read this one.Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      I am an American soldier currently deployed to the Middle East. This is a book of profound experiences in the Middle East. Critique: too many metaphors and similies, sometimes very descriptive but often lost me on her meaning. At one point she witnessed both the blood of an animal being butchered for a feast and the blood of humans after a suicide bomber in the same sentence as if they were both equally brutal. There were other things coupled similarly that I feel are vastly different. Overall an impressive work though.
    • 3/5
      I think the author had some great points but it seemed like she could have ended it much sooner.
    • 4/5


      This book packs a bit of an emotional wallop. This is not a finely crafted story, but a series of experiences in the Middle East post 9/11 as a young journalist is swept along and sent to report on the "War on Terror". It's powerful, emotional and is bound to linger.
    • 5/5
      Wow. Megan Stack was a finalist in 2007 for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. After reading this book, I am not surprised she was a finalist, only that she didn't win. She has fearlessly taken on a subject of great world controversy sparing no danger to herself both physically and mentally. Her writing is stunningly beautiful and poetic. It is also clear, explicitly honest, and heartbreakingly blunt.This is not a book about one experience in one country. It covers several countries in the Middle East region over a critical timeframe. Each chapter is a definitive account of a different country with her analysis of the situation as she was able to absorb and interpret what she saw and heard. Stack cuts to the heart of the problems, exposes the beauty and the ugliness of humanity, and holds up a mirror for Americans to see the reflection of their own policies and actions in this war.The tension and fear never let up. The realities of living in the midst of war hit the reader like the bombs that were dropped on villages of the innocent. Words on a page are never the same as real life experience. But this book is truly "an education in war" (as the title proclaims) to a nation that is far removed from its everyday horror and we had best pay attention. Everyone should read this one.Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      An interesting book. Some very haunting anecdotes--I'm thinking in particular about Ahmed and Birak near the end, but there are other stories too that I won't forget. It does get a little repetitive, though. I feel like Stack had something between a long magazine article and a short book and chose to stretch her material into a short book. I can't fault her for that, really, especially since she was nominated for a National Book Award! But the stretching shows.
    • 5/5
      "You can survive and not survive, both at the same time."War on Terror! Manifest or farce? Megan Stack, a foreign correspondent for the LA Times, attempts to answer that question. Shortly after 9/11, Stack found herself thrust into the Middle East, spending the next six years, in various hot zones: Afghanistan, occupied Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, Libya, Saudi Arabia and a few others.Stack’s first hand account of many atrocities is eye-opening and gut-wrenching. She befriends a variety of people in each of these dangerous locales, putting a human face on these tragedies. She is able to witness the myriad of lies and deceptions and experience the ugly hatreds, that fuel and drive these regions. Her prose is both tough and beautiful. She is a daring, unflinching journalist, looking directly into the horrible face of war."Only after covering it for years did I understand that the war on terror never really existed. It was not a real thing. Not that the war on terror was flawed, not that it was cynical or self-defeating, or likely to breed more resentment and violence. But that it was hollow, it was essentially nothing but a unifying myth for a complicated scramble of mixed impulses and social theories and night terrors and cruelty and business interests.”
    • 4/5
      An eager 25-year-old journalist, Megan Stack learned about the bombing of the Trade Towers while on vacation in France. Since she was physically closest to Afghanistan, her editor at the Los Angeles Times sent her to Afghanistan to be on the ground for the invasion. Thus began a seven year stint, reporting from all over the Middle East, wherever the fighting was heaviest: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, the West Bank.

      When her memoir begins, the world and its problems seem clear. Ms. Stack is naive and idealistic, absorbing all she experiences and writing the reports expected of her. But as time passes and the war drags on, she begins to see things that change the ways she thinks about the role of the West in the Middle East and specifically the policies of the United States. How can a nation promoting democracy turn a blind eye to some dictators and ruin a country in order to depose another? Who's side is just? Does it even matter given the amount of human suffering the conflicts inflict? Questions such as these begin to weigh on Megan, and her thoughts become grim as she reflects on the costs of the Middle East wars.

      This is who gets left behind when war comes: poor people, old people, and handicapped people. This is who they are bombing now. In this moment I am numb and still, but I am aware that I deeply hate everybody for letting this happen. I hate the Lebanese families for leaving them here. I hate Hezbollah for not evacuating them, for ensuring civilian deaths that will bolster their cause. I hate Israel for wasting this place on the heads of the feeble. I hate all of us for participating in this great fiction of the war on terror, for pretending there is a framework, a purpose, for this torment. I sit in hatred and write everything down with filthy fingers.

      Although the book is somewhat dated now, with Osama bin Laden dead and popular revolutions having brought down some of the despots about whom she writes, there is still an immediacy and potency to Ms. Stack's memoir that makes it compelling. Her writing is poetic, and her self-insights are honest and direct. The only difficulty for me is that as a journalist, she must remain apart and write of what she sees, instead of stopping to help the victims. She writes of how hard that is. I think I would have just stopped and done what I could. Regardless, the book is a heart-breaking tribute to those caught in a disaster not of their own making and to her own journey to greater self-awareness and understanding.
    • 5/5
      The world of war in the Middle East left its mark on this young journalist, and I'm grateful that she shared her post-9/11 experiences in Afghanistan, Israel, Libya, Iraq, Yemen, Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt witnessing the horror of death and the even more horrific impact on the survivors. Megan Stark ends up living in these war-torn countries for six years while she tries to figure out the truth to report to the readers of the Los Angeles Times. For six long years she subjected herself to the insanity of war after war, roadside bombs and bombs from the sky, broken bodies and broken souls. Megan's poetic words bring out the humanity on both sides of the wars she lives through observing the heartbreak and violence "of all the smashed things left behind."This eye-opening book is subtitled "An Education in War." By reading it, I learned that "you can survive and not survive, both at the same time." You won't hear these kinds of stories on the evening news. It's a very difficult book to read, but I urge you to read it and weep.
    • 5/5
      “The sun is shining like every mad morning in this garish war. I wake up to the crash of bombs and tell myself, just do it for one more day. Anyway you are trapped. If you try to get out of here they will kill you on the road. So do it for one more day. You know you wouldn’t leave, even if you could.” (Page 224)I’ve always wondered what kept the foreign correspondents in the extremely dangerous regions they cover. In Megan Stack’s National Book Award nominee, we learn at least one of the reasons. They are totally unable to pull themselves away from the danger, the excitement, the adrenaline high that just being there allows to course through their veins. For five years, Stack covered events in the volatile Middle East, from just after the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan through the 2006 Israeli bombing of Lebanon. Her time in Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, and Libya are highlighted by roadside bombs, interviews of warlords, suicide bombers, death and violence. And more death and more violence.The first thing that strikes you is the dichotomy between the absolutely stunning prose and the terror-filled violence. It doesn’t seem right that they should be lined up next to each other. Beauty glancing edges alongside carnage. But there it is, right before your eyes. Shimmering, beautiful prose/ferocious, violent bloodshed.Along the way, Stack makes the case against violence and against the course that the U.S. has chosen in the past. Regarding the war on terror she writes:“Somewhere between Afghanistan and Iraq, we lost our way. The carnage of it and the disorder, all to create a new Middle East because the old Middle East is still here, and where should it go? Only a country as quixotic, as history-free, as America could come up with this notion: that you can make the old one go away. Maybe you can debate until it makes sense from a distance, as an abstraction. But up close the war on terror isn’t anything but the sick and feeble cringing in an asylum, babies in shock, structure smashed. Baghdad broken, Afghanistan broken,. The line between heaven and earth, broken. Lebanon broken. Broken peace and broken roads and broken bridges. The broken faith and years of broken promises. Children inheriting their parents broken hearts, growing up with a taste for revenge. And all along, America dreaming it’s deep sweet dreams, there and not there. America chasing phantoms, running uphill to nowhere in pursuit of a receding mirage of absolute safety.” (Page 243)This is a book that should be on every American’s shelf, available to peruse at any time to remind ourselves of what we can and can’t do to influence the lives of those in the Middle East. You won’t regret buying it and you’ll be rewarded with an eye-opening frankness that just so happens to come in the form of beautiful poetry.
    • 5/5
      This is an extraordinary book. Megan Stack creates a collection of journalistic entries that discuss different experiences with armed conflict in the Middle East. Stack shows how strong and how breakable people are and how war truly has no beneficiaries.The people Stack encounters throughout the book all have heartbreaking stories and you may feel a little disgusted to be American by the end of it.While the conflicts that Stack reports on are terrible and have less than hopeful turn outs, her narrative does shed light on a culture that many Americans don't understand or even refuse to understand.We are all human and Stack does a wonderfully, graphic, heartbreaking job of showing that we all share common characteristics.
    • 5/5
      I picked up this book in my local library on a whim -- a kind of "why not"? I admit, my expectations were low -- I've read a lot of books by journalists since 9/11 about Afghanistan and the Middle East, and many of them have been mediocre. And frankly, I didn't know what there could conceivably be to say that hadn't already been said. And then I started reading this book this morning. And I'm blown away.To start with, Megan Stack is an astonishing writer. Interviewing a Yemeni judge who's chewing qat and being rather inarticulate, she says, "my pen chased his runaway thoughts over the page in long broken sentences.” Libyan drivers are insane; "they hurtle like mad fish chased by some unseen shark." In Jordan, a country where free political expression isn't exactly encouraged, on the eve of the Iraqi war Stack watches a crowd of mosque worshipers try to morph into antiwar protestors. But wait a minute: “Who would start the demonstration? They had so little practice." On the impact of adrenaline in a war zone: "the world smears around you in a carousel spin." Her descriptions are vivid, personal and always eloquent.She also has an eye for the ugly truths of situations that too many others try to convey in simplistic terms. She doesn't let herself off lightly at all -- she deplores herself for walking away from victims of bombings in order to chase down more of "the story" (one of the nasty secrets of war zone journalism), and she resents being held to account as a representative of her country and government, even as she admits that is necessary or inevitable. Covering Egyptian elections, she scorns "teahouse diplomats that came to see but didn't bother to look"; she is equally hard on Western women journalists who take refuge and instead of speaking out about endless harassment and discrimination they experience, says bluntly that the banal answer "but we get to talk to local women, which the men can't" is a cop-out.This is an extraordinary book, and one everyone -- regardless of their place on the political spectrum -- should read. No, it's not heartwarming or encouraging -- in fact, Stack's stint as a war correspondent leaves her profoundly disillusioned. Her final chapter puts her in the middle of an insane asylum in southern Lebanon, in the midst of the Israeli attack on Hezbollah. "Here I stand among the mad and maybe that’s all it’s ever been. The Middle East goes crazy and we go along with it." She has her own beliefs -- developed through experience and honed by witnessing the internecine conflicts of the region -- that it's hard to ignore, but even those who don't share them can't deny what it is that she has witnessed or reject at least some of the conclusions that she draws.
    • 4/5
      Though not entirely shocking, Megan Stack's Every Man in this Village is a Liar, is at times surprising. Stack describes her most memorable escapades and antidotes, which she layers to form an essay style war collage vividly enlivening her enlightening experiences. Covering terrorism, the war in Afghanistan, and other Middle Eastern hot spots, Stack conversationally engages her readers as she examines some of the absurdities of war and politics. Stack offers both sides of the table auditing violence and war policy itself. Seeing the devastation of war to people and countries through a fresh perspective, a young female reporter, was overwhelmingly gritty and at the same time startling in its obvious intelligence. Through stark and awkward prose Stack explores the hypocritical policies of nations. And the one thing Stack can trust, is that everyone involved in the wars and the fighting that she has covered--are liars. While exposing everyone and excusing no one, Stack has crafts a highly readable, brilliant and possibly the most unforgettable book of the year.