cover image Bringing Down Gaddafi: On the Ground with the Libyan Rebels

Bringing Down Gaddafi: On the Ground with the Libyan Rebels

Andrei Netto. Palgrave Macmillan, $28 (320p) ISBN 978-1-137-27912-5

The brief war in Libya was one of the most dangerous conflicts for reporters in recent history. Noting that “half as many journalists died during the eight-month conflict in Libya as in ten years of war in Afghanistan,” Netto, a Brazilian foreign correspondent who has reported from several dozen countries, got out in one piece but not before being arrested by a pro-Gadhafi militia and held incommunicado in a secret prison. His tense and suspenseful account on the ground in Libya includes his effort to find a way into the country and interviewing witnesses of the dictator’s final capture and summary execution. Traveling alongside Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, an Iraqi journalist he meets in Tunisia, Netto relies on a sequence of loosely coordinated underground rebel groups for protection and shelter, each one handing him off to others as he makes his way closer to the capital. When the pair is betrayed, their captors strip them and lead them at gunpoint into the desert, where Netto describes being “overcome with the feeling that my fate was sealed.” Unbowed by his detention, in the aftermath of the revolution, he uncovers mass graves and evidence of human rights abuses. Netto’s memoir of the conflict is a useful historical document and a well-crafted, humane introduction to the challenges of war reporting. [em](June) [/em]