Guerrilas

If, not long ago, the word guerrillas evoked images of idealists battling for justice, today the term is just as likely to call to mind less romantic notions of “sleeper cells” and “suicide bombers.” Based on a decade of firsthand interviews, Jon Lee Anderson’s Guerrillas takes us into the human culture of insurgency: from a sniper’s lookout in the Western Saharan desert, home to the Polisario guerrillas, to a mujahideen “courtroom” in an Afghan battlefield; from the rubble-strewn streets of Gaza during the first intifada, to the Burmese jungle and the mountains of El Salvador. Now, with the lethal renewal of the Palestinian intifada, and as Afghanistan struggles with its warrior traditions following the bloody rise and fall of the Taliban, the voices recorded in Guerrillas have more than ever to tell us.