Seven Days in Syria

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War is a collective matter. It involves nations, factions, and religions. However, it is also a personal affair. War is made by people and lived by people: the one who kills and the one who is killed, the one who becomes disabled and the one who sees their home bombed, the one who fights at the front and the one who watches helplessly as their life, as they knew it until then, collapses. In this book, Janine di Giovanni—the most significant war correspondent of her generation—does not make geopolitical analyses. She does not view war from above. She observes it from within, through the eyes of the people experiencing it. She narrates the stories of soldiers, both from the government army and the opposition, of the tortured, of civilians, of mothers, of children. She captures primal, physical feelings: pain, loss, brutality, horror. She records the smells of war, the sounds, the cold, the mud. She documents fears and hopes, mourning and devastation. Through dozens of human stories—the stories of Nanda, Mariam, Hussein, Mohamed, Abdullah, Carla—the author composes a poignant mural of a society that is devouring itself, driven into a fratricidal war and the greatest tragedy of our time.