Although he was the New York Times’ Pakistan bureau chief, Declan Walsh’s Nine Lives of Pakistan isn’t dry front-line reporting. While grounded in a journalist’s concern for facts (and reasonable interpretation), Walsh writes with a novelist’s eye for detail. Nine Lives is a travelogue through a troubled country, where a diverse and recognizably human characters play out their lives and schemes between the sharp edge of the military and the hard place of Islamist fundamentalism. Nine Lives is a lively, succinct overview of the country problems and personalities and the often unintended consequences of U.S. foreign policy in the region.
