The book is full of standalone gems such as:

“For most stories, good sources willing to talk are all over the place. You simply have to find them. Then shut up and listen. This takes resisting the temptation to play with out wondrous toys.”

“Serious journalism is measured by depth and consistency over time.”

The challenge of journalism he writes is:

“…to get it right within a context of history and humanity. The rest is only process”

The book is comprised of 18 chapters such as “Vietraqistan” and the all essential “Road Kit” and “Staying Alive”.

The author, Mort Rosenblum, is a seasoned journalist who has seen and reported from his fair share of conflicts. His passion for the field is clear in his writing. Towards the end of the book there is a chapter on “Readings for the Road” which encourages journalists to study history of the places and conflicts as well as history of journalism. Then there is a small appendix for the busy journalist  simply called  “Mort’s Rules” and consists of seven rules of global reporting each followed by a brief description. They are both concise and insightful:

1.      See it for yourself.

2.      Find your fixer.

3.      Think particular, not general.

4.      To be lucky, be where luck happens.

5.      Check back, keep at it.

6.      Take names; write down numbers.

7.      Show interest.

He follows this appendix with another generous six pages of other resources in the form of books and websites. The book is written in an accessible, direct rational manner but yet has enough anecdotes to bring it to life and a little sprinkle of humour. Whether reporting from Somalia or any other place, I for one will be referring to this book for a long, long time to come and would highly recommend it for any serious journalists, old or new.

Mort Rosenblum will be at the Frontline Club Tuesday 23rd November at 7pm. The event is in association with the BBC College of Journalism. Book here.

In 1997, Camilla Carr and Jonathan James were kidnapped and held for fourteen months in Chechnya. Speaking neither Russian nor Chechen, armed with good intentions and a car full of toys, the two Britons had volunteered to help traumatised children in Grozny. They were soon kidnapped, and this book – The Sky is Always There: Surviving a Kidnapping in Chechnya – is a ghastly tale of casual violence and the kidnappers’ contempt for their hostages.

Many who travelled to Chechnya at this time got into trouble. A tough and resourceful Russian woman journalist I knew also worked with children in Grozny. Galya thought she knew what she was doing, but the Chechen man she most trusted betrayed her and she was taken captive. After her release, she fostered half a dozen Chechen children in her tiny flat in Moscow. She did not return to Chechnya.

Around the same time the authors and Galya were seized, I was held under armed guard while attempting to track down President Dzhokhar Dudayev in hiding. Luckily, one bearded fighter recognised me from an afternoon when we had sheltered from shellfire together. The atmosphere lightened, and we were sent on our way to Dudayev. Afterwards, I too stopped working in Chechnya.

So how did the woefully unprepared Jon and Camilla think they would get away with it? Unable to talk to their captors, the couple were reduced to making sense of their situation in their own terms. They deployed healing visualisations, yogic breathing exercises and a strategy of appeasement. They even gave the gunmen massages. One captor raped Camilla many times over a prolonged period, with Jon listening in the next room. Eventually, she made it clear that the experience was terrible. The rapist claimed to be surprised, as he ostensibly thought that western women enjoyed rape. Camilla wondered whether she should have registered her objection sooner. The couple did not ask to be kidnapped, abused and raped, but the lesson is that people should think about the risk of going into an environment already known for the likelihood of kidnapping.

This is a car crash of a book, a how-not-to essay in on working in a war zone. Much of the time, one wants to shake the authors and ask them what they thought they were doing. Jon’s dreadlocks, their massages and Camilla’s clumsy confusion of eating and toilet utensils which so appalled their captors leave the impression that the authors didn’t do their homework. Apparently, they were arrogant enough to think they didn’t have to.

Reviewer: Richard Pendry is a lecturer in broadcast journalism at the University of Kent. He reported from all over the former Soviet Union, including Chechnya, for Frontline News in the 1990s. The Sky is Always There: Surviving a Kidnapping in Chechnya by Camilla Carr and Jonathan James is published by Canterbury Press and costs £14.99

I have read many sagas of Russian families, but Stalin’s Children: Three Generations of Love and War by Owen Matthews has facets that make it poignant. It is both tragedy and love story by a distinguished chronicler of the East. Matthews has covered Moscow for Newsweek since 1997 and has witnessed the Chechen, Bosnian and latest Iraqi wars. He knows something about the drama and tragedy of turbulent times. He also had his own story, his own Russian life. Half-Russian himself, he listened to his family and searched the archives to uncover what happened to his forebears. Stalin’s Children is not one story, but several.  
 
At its heart is the rise and fall of a single Bolshevik, Boris Bibikov, Matthews’ grandfather. He rose in the Bolshevik Party under Stalin, one of the heroic and tough generation who achieved collectivisation and industrialization at a terrible cost. Bibikov was a senior industrialist manager. Stalin’s old friend and industry chief, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, arrived at Bibikov’s factory to inspect it and urge ever greater efforts. Bibikov lived a high energy existence “spending nights at the office for days on end, but also balancing mistresses with his wife.”

Then in 1937, the atmosphere started to change: Bibikov’s boss, Sergo, opposed the rising arrests in his industrial commissariat and confronted Stalin at a Central Committee plenum. The conflict ended with Sergo’s suicide and the start of mass arrests of top officials. Bibikov was the classic and typical victim of the Great Terror, a senior official and loyal Bolshevik, who had experienced the revolution and known leaders other than Stalin. Soon he was arrested and disappeared. The family were told he had been sentenced for a long term but was alive. His daughters, Ludmilla and Lenina, although there was no Stalina, were truly Stalin’s children. They were taken into orphanages, and their story is at the heart of the book.

This is also the story of how Ludmilla fell in love with Matthews’ intellectual father, Mervyn, who found himself drawn into a KGB trap to “turn” him into a spy. He barely escaped. Here also is the story of how Ludmilla and Mervyn struggled to be together.

The last facet of this three generational story is Matthews’ own life as a journalist in the decadent and wild Moscow of the Nineties and how he uncovered his grandfather’s terrible fate. He writes engagingly about the wild frontier town excesses of Moscow Babylon, such as the notorious Hungry Duck night club. Simultaneously, he tells how he found the truth about Bibikov. The family had believed that he had somehow survived for a long time after 1937. They sent him letters and packages for years. Matthews finds his execution warrant, which showed he had been shot soon after his arrest.

Reviewed by Simon Sebag Montefiore is author of a two-part biography of Stalin and a new novel about three generations of a Russian family, Sashenka. Stalin’s Children: Three Generations of Love and War by Owen Matthews is published by Bloomsbury and costs £17.99.

Abdel Bari Atwan, author of A Country of Words: a Palestinian Journey from the Refugee Camp to the Front Page is the famous son of one of these dirt-poor Isdud families, born two years after the nakba, or catastrophe, that overtook his people when Israel was created. When he revisited his family’s original home a few years ago, his North African Jewish driver had no idea there had ever been a place called Isdud. When Bari (as he insists his non-Arab friends call him), treading through the stinking ruins of a former Palestinian site, Café Gaben,  bumped into a Jewish settler, the man said to him, pointing at the ancient detritus: “…that is the past.” “No,” Bari said, “it is also the future.”

It is this kind of fierce determination and will to survive that characterises Gaza and the Gazans. It is also why I described Gazan hopelessness, in my first paragraph, as “apparent”. Anyone who has been to what is now a virtual concentration camp will know that Gazans do not buckle under. The Abdel Bari Atwan story is an epic version of the Gazan refugees’ refusal to accept the overwhelming, demeaning, life-threatening odds that Israel and the West have imposed upon them, the Arab states also doing their bit in this saga of criminal international politics.

Bari fought and harried his way – with his family’s typically Palestinian, almost sacrificial help – from the penury and oppression of Deir al Balah and later Rafah camps through a series of joe-jobs and secondary education in Jordan then Egypt, university in Cairo and progression up the rickety journalistic ladder in Libya, Saudi Arabia and London’s vibrant Arabic media to become editor, in 1989, of Al-Quds al-Arabi (Arab Jerusalem). This is his own newspaper, his own radical mouthpiece and unique, outspoken reflection of the inequities, crimes and joys of the Middle East. He is probably, following the deaths of Yasser Arafat, Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish, the best-known living Palestinian. His newspaper is so popular that it is banned in as many Arab countries as he himself is – Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt and Jordan among them.

Al-Quds al-Arabi is no one’s mouthpiece. Bari lists his many differences with Yasser Arafat and most other Arab politicians, and his inside knowledge of Islamic leaders whom our media and politicians demonise is a useful reality check. One of his Islamist interlocutors spells out how Tony Blair made the British an international target for terrorists (cf, the recent Mumbai outrage).

For all his valid criticisms of the British, for what they did to his Palestine, and of the Americans and the Israelis, Abdel Bari makes clear that for the honest Arab journalist his own governments, secret services and often inane fellow citizens pose his greatest threats. He also gives salutary space to the BBC’s record of pusillanimity in the face of Blairite and Israeli pressures on the Palestinian issue.

If this is a cheering, proud and opinionated tale of human determination, humour and iconoclasm, it also portrays the unique sadness of the Palestinians. While most emigrants cherish the knowledge of an original home available for revisit or return, the Palestinian Arab has no such grounding. “I feel,” writes Bari, “that my cultural identity has become blurred with time and that to some extent I have lost my roots…I wonder if history has condemned us [Palestinians] to a permanent state of psychological exile.” A Jew would know exactly what he means—or would have, once.

As our own British Government joins and intensifies the persecution and isolation of the Gazan people, partly because in democratic elections nearly three years ago they voted for a party Britain does not–or is told not to—approve, Abdel Bari’s book is the perfect  guidebook to what has happened, why, and how it goes on and on and on.

Reviewed by Tim Llewellyn, a former BBC Middle East Correspondent. A Country of Words: a Palestinian Journey from the Refugee Camp to the Front Page by Abdel Bari Atwan is published by Saqi Books £20

Last year, while trying to pick the sixth book for my African Reading Challenge, I explained how I wanted a book that wasn’t self-consciously a book about Africa. I wanted a story, a biography, a self-help guide, whatever, that just happened to be set in Africa. I failed. And as a result didn’t even manage to finish the six books that I was hoping to review.

Then along comes Bikila: Ethiopia’s Barefoot Olympian and I have my sixth book. This biography is most definitely a book that would be filed under sport rather than world affairs, but in telling the story of Abebe Bikila, who exploded on to the sporting scene at the 1960 Rome Olympics, Tim Judah has found a very human story that also reveals a huge amount about Ethiopian life through the 1960s and 1970s.

As he cruised to victory in the Marathon, Bikila was the first black athlete to win Olympic gold thus setting the tone for the rest of the century. That he did it barefoot pretty much in the shadow of the looted Axum Obelisk and only a couple of decades after Mussolini claimed Ethiopia for Italy, only added to the historical resonance.

Judah masterfully interweaves Ethiopia’s troubled political history with the story of Bikila’s triumph and ultimate decline. There are audiences with Haile Selassie, Bikila is detained during a failed coup and there are agonised discussions about whether it was appropriate for an Ethiopian to be seen running barefoot, such was Abyssinian pride.

Bikila’s is an incredible story. He and his coach, Onni Niskanen, revolutionised the way Africa was viewed by the rest of the world. But like many African runners Bikila succumbs to his celebrity lifestyle, drinking heavily and is eventually paralysed in a car crash. He died a year later.

Judah’s book is filled with some of the best sports journalism from the age, vivid accounts of Olympics past but at times it reads too much like a journalist’s book, heavy on sources and quotes. I would have liked him occasionally to put his notebook aside to fill in the gaps and round out the story. But then I guess the blurb wouldn’t have been able to say "for the first time, his true story is told". This is still a cracking read.

My previous reviews in the Africa Reading Challenge

• Warriors by Gerald Hanley
• The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer
• A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul
• The Wizard of the Nile by Matthew Green
• Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley and Livingstone by Martin Dugard

Cowell has dome something better. His meticulously researched opus – The Terminal Spy: A True Story of Espionage, Betrayal and Murder – The First Act of Nuclear Terrorism and the New Cold War – fully justifies its sub-title, which is perhaps the more important part of the story. “Who?” is partly answered in the evidence piled up against Litvinenko’s erstwhile colleague Andrei Lugovoi, whom the British authorities have tried, unsuccessfully, to have extradited from Moscow .
 
Cowell’s summing up of the forensic investigation which proved Litvinenko was poisoned with a minute trace of the isotope Polonium-210, sprayed into a teapot is worthy of “CSI”. It also makes clear how close the authorities came to NOT finding the  murder weapon. Polonium only showed up when a secret facility tested Litvinenko’s final urine sample.

“If the (British)  Ministry of Defence scientists had not run the extremely unusual tests when they did”, Cowell writes. “it is conceivable that the nature of the poisoning would have remained a mystery, as Litvinenko’s killers surely intended it to be…” His description of the poison at work is chilling: “…the isotope tore relentlessly through his bone marrow and his organs, destroying the immune system. The lethal dose measured a tiny fraction of a microgram…This was no ordinary murder.” Rhe “no ordinary” aspect takes thia book to another level, an artful  melding of  “who?” with “why?”

The inescapable conclusion is that the other half of  “who” is the then president, now prime minister of Russia, Vladimir Putin. Cowell connects him to the “Why?” with a deft weaving of the role of the Russian oligarchs, especially Litvinenko’s one-time employer and Putin’s enemy Boris Berezovsky and their power struggles with the Kremlin and the Russian security service, the FSB.

Meticulous reporting, using intelligence sources and participants in the affair, shines a light into the usually opaque world of Russian policy. To restore Russia ‘s place as a world power Putin could not tolerate dissent from regional governments, troublesome members the Duma (parliament), journalists (twenty mysteriously killed, including Anna  Politkovskaya) or dissidents like Litvinenko railing from ostensibly safe exile. “Putin,” Cowell writes, “restored what the Russians call the ‘vertical’ power structure, whose apex is the Kremlin.”

The Terminal Spy sums up: “The death of Litvinenko would come to be seen as the defining moment of the Putin presidency. Putin sought to restore Moscow ‘s greatness. The death of Litvinenko ensured that Russia ‘s reputation as a land to be feared for the worst of reasons was revived for all the world to see.” Given that the book was written well before the latest clashes in Georgia, the observation is prescient to say the least.

Reviewed by Allen Pizzey, roving correspondent for CBS News, based in Rome. The Terminal Spy: A True Story of Espionage, Betrayal and Murder – The First Act of Nuclear Terrorism and the New Cold War by Alan Cowell published by Doubleday, £16.99.

Levy and Scott-Clark’s book is a well-researched and comprehensive account of how Pakistan acquired nuclear weapons. It will, despite a sensationalist conclusion, become an unavoidable work of reference for anyone studying the subject. After India got the bomb, it was inevitable that the Pakistani military would try and obtain one as well. The late Pakistani Prime Minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, said so in public and the Libyans agreed to fund the project. The details of how this was done can be found in this book. Bhutto lost his life for daring to defy the United States. His executioner, General Zia ul Haq, built the bomb while the US, obsessed with defeating the Russians in Afghanistan, turned a blind eye. The same General institutionalised Islamist ideology in the country and the army.

I have always been opposed to nuclear weapons for moral, political and biological reasons. What I dislike, however, is the notion that some can have them and others can’t. When Protestant fundamentalist settlers from England armed with muskets encountered native North American tribes with bows and arrows, the outcome was clear. Had the settlers only had bows and arrows, the peace-pipe and negotiations might have led to a different world. Today any large country and a few smaller ones feel that bows and arrows are not enough. Hence, we observe the drive for nuclear weapons as both a deterrent and a mechanism for self-defence. Indians and Pakistanis argue that if France and Britain have them, why not us?

It was the idea of a nuclear monopoly that was one of the causes of the Sino-Soviet split in the early Sixties. Moscow refused to share nuclear secrets with Peking and subsequently there was much talk in the Soviet press of the ‘yellow peril’. Since 9/11 and the NATO occupation of Afghanistan, there has been much scaremongering in the Western press of the danger of a jihadi finger on the Pakistani nuclear trigger. Levy and Scott-Clark give too much weight to al-Qaeda fantasies, presumably in order to enhance the importance of their book. According to most Western intelligence agencies, the al-Qaeda nucleus in South Asia is comprised of fewer than a thousand people. The Pakistan Army is half-a-million strong with a command structure that has never been broken. What could break it is a direct US entry into the North-West Frontier of the country and any foolish attempt to capture the nuclear facility. Were that to happen, all bets would be on.

Reviewer: Tariq Ali is the author of The Clash of Fundamentalisms and Bush in Babylon, both from Verso Books.   

Since 2000, when Putin came to office, Russia has been ruled with ever-increasing intolerance of opposition and ever greater authoritarianism. Medvedev promised a new liberalism, but one school of thought suggests that his ascent to the Kremlin is a manoeuvre to allow Putin to return to the presidency in 2012 without breaching the constitutional limit of two consecutive four-year terms.

In the meantime, much attention will focus on Putin’s placemen in Kremlin, many of them drawn, like Putin himself, from the KGB and its domestic successor, the FSB – the so called siloviki, who control both the levers of raw power and an increasing slice of Russia’s economy. Their activities are chronicled alongside Putin’s in this book by Yuri Felshtinsky and Vladimir Pribylovsky, both critics of the Kremlin. Pribylovsky is identified as a Russian journalist running several human-rights websites. Historian Felshtinsky is better knows as an associate of Alexander Litvinenko, the former FSB officer poisoned in London in November 2006. Felshtinsky and Litvinenko co-authored Blowing up Russia, which blamed the Russian authorities for the apartment house bombings that preceded the Second Chechen War – the conflict that cemented Putin’s rise to power – in 1999.

This latest book depicts the Putin era as one in which the President and his secret service comrades have usurped power to create the equivalent of a corporation to carve up the country’s wealth among its executives and shareholders – the siloviki. ” The question for the rest of us is what will happen when the economy has a downturn and the Russian trough of plenty empties,” the authors write. “Strife between the shareholders is likely to be fierce, manipulative and brutal.”

As with much else about Putin’s Russia, this work makes little distinction between analysis and polemics. Felshtinsky is an associate of Boris Berezovsky, the self-exiled tycoon waging a ferocious propaganda war on the Kremlin from London. Some of the book’s accusations lack the sourcing that could reasonably be expected of a historian  or a journalist. (Chapter One, for instance, has no footnotes.) The Age of Assassins does not illuminate what might lie ahead so much as  consider over key developments of the last eight years, sometimes in a conspiratorial and unsubstantiated manner. But it contends that the silovisi  are the true repositories of power rather than the public figures ruling on their behalf.

Reviewer: Alan Cowell is London correspondent of The New York Times and author of a forthcoming book on the Litvinenko affair.

For me New York’s query that night illustrated the troubling double standard that hovers sinisterly in the background of most reporting on the Middle East by the mainstream US press, then and now. It’s most obvious in  reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as Friel and Falk convincingly set out in this scathing analysis of six years of coverage (2000 to 2006) of this conflict by the New York Times. Friel and Falk are no newcomers to challenging the high and mighty in the US media. Friel took on the Wall Street Journal in Dogs of War, a polemic on how the paper’s editorial page openly (and wrongly) supported a right wing crusade against international law. With Falk, a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California, he authored the companion volume, The Record of the Paper.

Friel and Falk’s issue with the New York Times is not so much that its reporting of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is inaccurate on a story by story, fact by fact, basis. The reporting is skewered by the paper’s refusal to give proper credence to both history and the relevance of Palestinian rights under international law in regard to reaching a fair and sustainable solution.
For example, during the Camp David negotiations, The Times was fulsome in its praise for Prime Minister Barak’s generosity in being prepared to withdraw from slightly more than 90 per cent of the West Bank. At the same, time it portrayed Arafat as a stumbling block to peace when he refused. That, the authors argue, was incorrect in fact and under international law. The Palestinians were dispossessed of most of their land by the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and the 1967 war took the remaining 22 per cent of their original territory. Barak’s purported offer was hardly generous – 90 per cent of 22 per cent – and required the Palestinians to accept that UN resolutions on the illegality of Israel’s occupation of any part of the West Bank and Gaza was suddenly legalised.

History, as we all know, is something that many Americans, especially their newspapers and administrations, find bothersome at best and irrelevant at worst. This may be why the US is bogged down in Baghdad and about to be seriously embarrassed in Afghanistan. And why President Bush has no chance of brokering a deal between Israel and the Palestinians before he leaves office.

Reviewer: John Borrell was Time magazine correspondent in the Middle East and bureau chief in Latin America.

In doing so, he renders all of us who write and worry about Iraq in his debt. Cockburn has been travelling to and reporting on Iraq since 1978, returning even as recently as last month. He witnessed the many phases of Shia political convulsion, from the first Baathist crackdown against the Shia Islamist Dawa party in the 1970s, through the conflicts of loyalties during the Iran-Iraq war, the doomed uprising after the Kuwait war in 1991, and Saddam’s attempts to manipulate the religious revival in Iraq in the 90s by allowing (briefly) some space for Muqtadr’s father. Mohammed Baqr al Sadr was a senior cleric, who managed to preach against US sanctions, alcohol, immodesty and secular authority before he was executed, along with two of his sons, in 1999. Muqtada’s rise with his Mehdi Army has its roots in the reverence afforded to his Sadr antecedents.

The background and Iraqi Shia context that Cockburn carefully explains are important to understanding the paradoxes and murderous complexities that came rushing out of Pandora’s box after the fall of Saddam. He is particularly good at describing the Barchester Chronicle-like feuding and bitching between the different grand Shia clerical families and religious strains in the Holy City of Najaf. He is equally informative about the disconnect between the Shia parties who returned from exile in Tehran after the war and Moqtada’s seething sans culottes of the Shia slums.  Cockburn carefully unpicks rivalries and political switchbacks and manages to explain (no easy task) various entangled episodes: the mob-murder of the moderate Sayyid Khoei in Najaf just days after Baghdad fell in 2003 for which the Americans later tried to arrest Muqtada; the appointment of Nuri al Maliki (who?) as prime minister; and the surprising Mehdi Army ceasefire during the recent surge.

Cockburn shows that, despite the “firebrand cleric” label and the demonisation, Muqtada has kept a constant path: opposing the American occupation while maintaining a political platform as head of a half-starved urban underclass. The Americans have tried to eliminate Muqtada, by war, politics and denouncing him as an Iranian stooge, but have never afforded his movement the respect that his constituency should command. “Political solution” and “security” have become Iraq’s chicken-and-egg that Muqtada needs to grapple with as much as anyone else in the conflict. Can he control the violent excesses of his militia? For that matter, can any party in Iraq control its thugs? There’s no answer yet.

Reviewer: Wendell Steavenson has written on Iraq for Slate.com, the Financial Times Magazine and Granta. She has also written a book on Iraq that Grove Atlantic is publishing at the end of this year.