And Then All Hell Broke Loose

June 3, 1988
The author of Johnny's Song (which earned him the title of National Poet Laureate of the Vietnam Veterans of America) attempts to reconcile his Vietnam experiences with his return to America. These poems are a veteran's raw, heartfelt pleas for lasting peace and for a reevaluation of patriotism, nationalism and a government that wars ``as a solution to economics/or as a perpetuation of social justice.'' Verses shift from jarring, often graphic accounts of the atrocities Mason witnessed to strangely peaceful images of his childhood, family and friends. These juxtapositions would be more effective were they not so explicitly spelled out; Mason explains rather than illustrates, and he frequently lapses into didactic sermonizing. Although his message is certainly worthy, Mason's tendency to rely on political rhetoric rather than craft (in ``A Living Memorial,'' for example, he writes, ``It is the courage of America/ and the strength of our world/ that the essence of our patriotism/ is not nationalism,/ it is humanity'') makes his work more appropriate to forms of expression other than poetry. The introduction by film director Oliver Stone adds nothing of value to this volume.

Starred review from February 1, 2016
As a print and broadcast journalist with his own boots on the ground in the Middle East for more than 20 years, Engel has seen it all: sectarian violence and civil uprisings, stealth kidnappings and terrorist beheadings, the fall of dictators and the rise of rebel warlords. Now Engel takes a long view, not only of his career trajectory from struggling stringer straight out of Stanford to bureau chief and chief foreign correspondent for NBC News, but also of the genesis of the ancient conflicts that form the foundation of contemporary unrest in a diverse and divisive region. His grasp of Middle East history is encyclopedic, yet Engel distills the major tenets of geopolitical and religious conflict into comprehensible and comprehensive terms. His professional and personal witness to everything from the arrest of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt to the execution of Saddam Hussein in Iraq brings an immediacy to globe-altering events and provides an authenticity that transcends the in-harm's-way reportage that has earned him journalism's highest honors. Clear, candid, and concise, Engel's overview of the ongoing battleground should be required reading for anyone desiring a thorough and informed portrait of what the past has created and what the future holds for the Middle East and the world at large.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

January 15, 2016
A deft personal account of a career spent reporting from the Middle East, witnessing the evaporation of peace and stability. NBC chief foreign correspondent Engel (War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq, 2008, etc.) takes a confident, thorough approach to this fusion of memoir and journalistic narrative, beginning with evolutionary overviews of both Islam and the modern Middle East. Looking back, he concludes that his own youthful, improvisational journalistic beginnings in Egypt in 1997 coincided with the impending downfall of dictators like Saddam Hussein. "Saddam was the first of the Arab big men to go," he writes. In cleanly structured chapters, the author explores his reporting during particular flash points, beginning with ominous early examples of fundamentalist terrorism, through the Syrian war and the spread of the Islamic State group, illustrating a harsh thesis of entropy fueled by successive American administrations: "Bush's aggressive interventionism and Obama's timidity and inconsistency completely destroyed the status quo." Engel's personalized viewpoint supports this claim, presenting a coherent episodic narrative alongside his own high-risk career. He was offered a position as Palestinian-affairs correspondent for a French press agency in time to witness the violent Second Intifada. From there, he often wound up in harm's way, as when he found himself the last American correspondent in Baghdad at the outset of the second Iraq War, leading to employment as a foreign correspondent for ABC. The depth of Engel's experience is clear, yet his boldness may have led to an overconfidence that contributed to his 2012 kidnapping in Syria. "Those [experiences] gave me a false sense of security, and I guess I got greedy," he writes. "In journalism, you never want to get greedy." Engel seems capable and likably frank, in contrast to his pessimistic conclusions: "A lot of killing remains to be done before leaders of stature emerge--and before the fires of chaos are tamped down once again." An intriguing journalistic memoir built around a lucid, alarming overview of where the Middle East has been and where it is heading.

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September 15, 2015

NBC Chief Foreign Correspondent Engel, whose stash of honors include Peabody and Overseas Press Club awards, reflects on his nearly 20 years of covering Middle East conflict, starting with a massacre in Egypt when he was just signing on as a reporter. Since then, he's seen war in Iraq, the fall of Gaddafi, the Arab Spring, and the rise of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS while surviving a kidnapping in Syria.

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