In the Hot Zone: One Man, One Year, Twenty Wars [With DVD]

by Kevin Sites

Book Overview

Kevin Sites is a man on a mission. Venturing alone into the dark heart of war, armed with just a video camera, a digital camera, a laptop, and a satellite modem, the award-winning journalist covered virtually every major global hot spot as the first Internet correspondent for Yahoo News. Beginning his journey with the anarchic chaos of Somalia in September 2005 and ending with the Israeli-Hezbollah war in the summer of 2006, Sites talks with rebels...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0061228753
• ISBN13: 9780061228759
• Release Date: October 2007
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.0" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Revelations That Won't Be Televised

The short attention span and corporate management of mainstream media has pushed serious investigative journalists to the fringes, with good ones like Kevin Sites forced to work independently or in unsustainable online operations. The subject of this book is Sites' year-long project for Yahoo! News in which he visited 20 war zones in a single year. The project led to some unexpected results. With so much traveling Sites did not have the time to report from each combat zone with a great amount of in-depth investigation, but on the other hand the project is a sobering illustration of how much senseless violence is taking place in the world at any given time. The rapid schedule also led Sites to dispense with standard action news coverage and to concentrate on the innocent civilians and overworked soldiers who have to take the brunt of bad decisions by politicians and demagogues. In the process, Sites comes up with incredible insights on war and politics that are as compelling as they are low-key, and his skills as an investigative journalist are complemented by a writer's gift for reaching powerful insights in few words. America is full of pundits who think they can make big statements about wars and humanitarian crises that they have not seen in person and about which they've only heard propaganda. Kevin Sites and other courageous old-school journalists like him have really been on the front lines. Too bad the mass media is too yellow to give them the airtime that they, and their subjects, deserve. [~doomsdayer520~]

Immensely readable!

Sites' book is just fantastic. He chronicles his experience as an online journalist, giving background information that goes beyond the stories and features on his website. The most striking thing about the book is its structure: Each chapter is divided up into smaller sections, each quickly digestible and ideal for stopping. This book is great for reading on the bus or at work (you know who you are!) Sites makes a real effort not to give us "misery porn," and this book self-consciously details this effort. Sites obviously gets emotionally bogged down by the constant scenes of depression and poverty; going back to the structure of the book, each story, or anecdote, can strike you in a different way. While he writes about an amputee's miserable life in one snippet, another snippet describes the joy that same amputee experiences while singing. I think Sites really tries to balance every tear with a smile. This book also deals -- both implicitly and explicitly -- with issues in journalism and media/communications: ethics, professionalism, the role of media, new teachnologies, etc. An all-around good read, I don't rate many books this highly.

Important reading for Americans

The title of the book refers to Kevin Sites's project as a news correspondent for Yahoo!News to visit and report from all of the "hot zones" or places of armed conflict within the world in a one-year span. The bulk of the book consists of short chapters on each of twenty such hot zones. A second story concerns Sites's being at the wrong place at the right time and videotaping a Marine executing an unarmed and wounded Iraqi insurgent in a mosque near Falluja in November 2004, as well as the aftermath and public controversy, the ultimate questionable decision of U.S. military top brass not to charge any one, and the author's own wrestling with ethical issues (both journalistic and personal) raised by the incident. THE HOT ZONE is not a perfect book (primarily because it is too breezily written), but it surfaces enough issues of serious public import that it warrants five stars and wide readership within the United States. Probably the best way to give a feel for some of those issues is to quote Sites: "As the world's last remaining superpower, the American public's ambivalence about world affairs is not just regrettable but irritating and unacceptable." This is Sites's obsession. More: "We have unparalleled access to information, yet on the most important matters of our responsibility as global citizens, we live in information poverty. America is a third-world nation in its per capita knowledge of the people, issues and events outside its borders." The chief value of THE HOT ZONE is as one small corrective to that appalling ignorance and indifference. With regard to the American soldiers carrying out our government's policy and fighting in Iraq (as with the earlier generation of American soldiers in Vietnam): "[D]o we want to just say thank you * * * -- or do we need to try to understand that asking them to kill for us may also kill something inside of them?" "There are few good guys in this war [the current one in Iraq] -- or in the majority I have seen." In other words, in twenty hot zones Sites encountered few noble, morally pure warriors. "War poses as combat but is really collateral damage. * * * [S]ocieties are encouraged by their leaders to romanticize warriors and their weapons * * * while avoiding thoughts of the legacy of civil destruction they also bring." It is that collateral damage, the civil destruction Sites found in every one of his hot zones, that is the ultimate (and for me, most memorable, even haunting) subject of his journalism. Further on the credit side, I should mention and applaud a useful appendix that summarizes each of the "hot zones" -- including numbers dead and displaced, a timeline, and a paragraph on the current "conflict status" -- as well as a DVD ("A World of Conflict") that comes with the book. Now for a couple complaints: The narrative is sub-divided into brief, separately titled segments, many of which are only one to four paragraphs long and few of which extend more than two pages. For ex

A monastic journalist's view of the world and the wars we wage.

I was immediately sucked into "In the Hot Zone" when Sites recounts his personal drama after reporting on the 2004 Iraq mosque shooting, which ultimately sent him hurtling away from mainstream network news to his Yahoo! project. And then Sites begins his journey, and although we get personal anecdotes along the way, he focuses mainly on his subject: each and every war zone on the planet, its victims and its perpetrators. I began to really ask myself whether I liked this approach or not. I was thinking, there are two ways to go with this kind of travelogue material: the bestselling, highly personal, "Eat, Pray Love" approach by Elizabeth Gilbert. Or the more dispassionate "The Places In Between" treatment by Rory Stewart. Ultimately, Kevin adopted neither, as he tried to grasp the magnitude of all the material he had produced in a year's worth of war zones. And what emerges, so profoundly, is his own style. Short chapters, scenes from a tragedy, punctuated with occasional stories of courage, hope and humanity. What comes across clearly is a journalist's isolation, frustration, honesty and devotion to his craft -- almost like a monk pushing himself beyond his breaking point in the name of some indescribable mission. As you get deeper into the book, Sites' writing becomes more philosophical, often poetic. And at some point, you have to throw up your hands and ask yourself: how? How do we do this to each other? How does one man do this to himself? I would have liked to have heard more personal anecdotes from the author about the challenge of the task he had assumed, and how he felt after he returned to Iraq for the first time after the mosque shooting incident. Also, I would have happily endured a book twice as long just to linger a little while longer in a few locations that we never hear about otherwise. Still, this is required reading for anyone who takes journalism seriously. And the bonus DVD is a great addition, but almost not necessary, given how vividly Sites expresses himself in writing.

GREAT Book--Detailed, Moving, Provocative, Well Done

This is a great book, and an excellent companion to my friend Robert Young Pelton's Robert Young Pelton's The World's Most Dangerous Places: 5th Edition (Robert Young Pelton the World's Most Dangerous Places). I have copious notes that I provide below, but up front want to mention that the books comes with a DVD that is SENSATIONAL. The author is not just a gifted writer and observer of the human condition, but also a gifted photographer and cinematographer and his work is shown off to great advantage by Peripetela Pictures in "A World of Conflict: a play." In 24 chapters, one gets a mix of superb video on each of about 20 "hot zones" and also two "mellow" zones: Kurdistan at peace, and Iran with a huge middle class that disagrees with its government's radical posture. The video helps make clear the author's point that broadcast television is not doing the greatest job in showing complex situations. The film ends with a dedication to the tens of millions of innocent victims. This book, which is vastly more detailed than the video, but best enjoyed AFTER watching the video, is completely different from Pelton's encyclopedic work, and ends with a tour of "Third WOrld America." I warmed to the author and his work very quickly as I read his superb and consistently ethical discussion and illustration of complex ethical challenges that we all too often avoid through self-censorship, not trusting the US public to "get it." The author is clearly committed to telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and I for one consider him vastly more honorable and trustworthy than anyone now running for President, other than Ron Paul, the only common sense person in the lot. He became a celebrity by accident, with a clip of a cold-blooded killing by a Marine of a wounded man who has surrendered to other Marines, but like Steve Emerson, whose famous 1994 PBS video exposed the immams on US soil calling for the murder of Americans--a film that got him exiled from broadcast journalism and ignored by the FBI--this author ended up finding himself within a Yahoo Internet opportunity. The bottom line on this book is that there are grave (no pun intended) consequences of ignoring any and all failed states. A couple of notes: US and Belgium set stage for the Congo genocide of millions by putting a mad dictator in charge; Darfur is technically not a genocide because there are a multiplicity of actors killing indiscriminantly; In tribal conflicts, having a bodyguard and translator team of one from each clan disarms the varied roadblocks by alternating clans (US Government does not appear ready to fund this option yet, they tend to go with the best English speaker, teachers with no warlord stature). Economics of scarcity, not race or tribes, are at the root of conflict. I will take this opportunity to note that corruption and predatory immoral capitalism, as well as unilateral US militarism and virtual colonialism, are an absolute foundati