Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0802117236, Hardcover)

Two weeks after the terrorist attacks of September 11, New York correspondent and best-selling author Jon Lee Anderson became one of the first Western journalists to get into Afghanistan. Anderson had reported on the mujahideen's war against the communist-backed government in Kabul more than a decade before, but the situation in Afghanistan now was unprecedentedly dangerous even for a seasoned reporter. There were no clearly demarcated front lines, and the roads were full of mines and bandits. Since most of the country had no electricity or phone lines, journalists communicated via satellite phones powered by gasoline generators. Anderson stayed in the country for months, filing stories that illuminate a high-technology conflict in a feudal terrain. In The Lion's Grave these reports are supplemented by vivid first-person e-mail accounts that take the reader onto the ground and into the process of reporting the war. Anderson reported from the court of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the deposed but still-official president of Afghanistan, whose home city of Faizabad was filled with conspiracy theorists and resentful minions. He witnessed the fall of Kunduz, one of the last Taliban bastions, and the interim government's clumsy takeover in Kabul. In post-conflict Kandahar, where he met with an old acquaintance who was the neighbor of Mullah Omar and who turned the city over to the Taliban in 1994, he found evidence that the Taliban were not simply the austere, self-abnegating men they claimed to be. The Lion's Grave also includes a previously unpublished account of the urgent search for Osama bin Laden in the caves of Tora Bora. Distinguished by Anderson's gritty, on-the-ground observations, probing interviews, and extraordinary gift for telling a story, The Lion's Grave is war reporting in the tradition of A. J. Liebling and Michael Herr. It captures the war at its pivotal moments and crystallizes the inherent precariousness of Afghanistan's future. It is destined to become a classic.