Inside Syria, The Human Side of the Civil War
Once in a decade comes an account of war that promises to be a classic.
Doing for Syria what Imperial Life in the Emerald City did for the war in Iraq, The Morning They Came for Us bears witness to one of the most brutal, internecine conflicts in recent history. Drawing from years of experience covering Syria for Vanity Fair, Newsweek, and the front pages of the New York Times, award-winning journalist Janine di Giovanni gives us a tour de force of war reportage, all told through the perspective of ordinary people―among them a doctor, a nun, a musician, and a student.
What emerges is an extraordinary picture of the devastating human consequences of armed conflict, one that charts an apocalyptic but at times tender story of life in a jihadist war zone. Recalling celebrated works by Ryszard Kapus´cin´ski, Philip Gourevitch, and Anne Applebaum, The Morning They Came for Us, through its unflinching account of a nation on the brink of disintegration, becomes an unforgettable testament to resilience in the face of nihilistic human debasement.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Janine di Giovanni, Middle East Editor of Newsweek and contributing editor of Vanity Fair, is one of Europe’s most respected and experienced reporters. Her reporting has been called “established, accomplished brilliance” and she has been cited as “the finest foreign correspondent of our generation”.
She became an Ochberg Fellow at Columbia University in recognition of her work on violence and war and the trauma it brings to society, and has been named as one of the 100 most influential people reducing armed conflict by Action on Armed Violence (AOAV). She is also a PAKIS SCHOLAR AT THE FLETCHER SCHOOL FOR LAW AND DIPLOMACY, TUFTS UNIVERSITY; Associate Fellow at the Geneva Center for Policy Studies and a non-resident fellow in INTERNATIONAL SECURITY at the New America Foundation. Her themes are conflict, crimes against humanity, refugee issues, transitional justice and security.
Her work is widely anthologized and in 2014 her article from Harper’s Magazine, “Life during Wartime”, was chosen by the writer Paul Theroux as one of the essays included in The Best American Travel Writing.
Since the beginning of the Arab Spring, Di Giovanni has mainly been focused in the Middle East, a region she has been working in for two decades. She travels extensively to Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria to do field work and research. Her concentration has been on the war in Syria, and her new book, “The Morning They Came For Us: Dispatches From Syria”, will be published next spring by W.W. Norton as well as Bloomsbury in the UK in early 2016. A documentary will also be released about her investigative work inside Syria, called 7 Days in Syria.
She recently published a groundbreaking investigation into the funding of the Islamic State, which was a cover story for Newsweek.
She has consulted with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on the Syrian refugee crisis, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and Internews.In 2013, she was a Senior Policy Fellow at The Center for Conflict, Negotiation and Recovery at Central European University,focusing on giving Syrian refugees a political voice post-war in Aleppo, Syria.
She has done three long investigations into Syrian human rights violations, including rape and torture. She has received grants from The Nation Institute for this work, and her long format pieces were published in Granta, the New York Times, Vanity Fair and Newsweek.
In October, 2014, Janine became an Associate Fellow at the Geneva Center for Security Policy in Geneva, Switzerland