GUERRILLAS: The men and women fighting today's wars.

Passionate, defiant, and idealistic, guerrillas evoke romantic images of the struggle for a just cause, giving them an almost mythical place among the bravest of warriors. Guerrillas takes us into their worlds, revealing their enigmatic and tumultuous lives. Veteran foreign correspondent Jon Lee Anderson reports from five different war fronts, creating a rich and penetrating portrait of an outlawed way of life in which physical courage and moral stamina are requisites to daily survival.
"Guerrillas," he writes, "are people living in defiance of their would-be conquerors, according to their own laws and beliefs, telling their own stories and legends - making history." Anderson weaves together their many stories - using the diverse voices of the guerrillas themselves - to bring us an extraordinary vision of individuals risking their lives in the struggle to change things. He takes us to a sniper's lookout across a line in the sand of the western Sahara; to a mujahedin "courtroom" in Afghanistan; to a Salvadoran village where fighters and farmers' children dance into the night; to the rubble-strewn streets of Gaza, where young Palestinians battle Israeli soldiers; and to the Burmese jungle, which for forty years has been a killing ground occupied by ethnic rebels and heavily armed government troops.
As strategic interests shift - and even evaporate - in the post-cold-war era, guerrilla movements, long the bloodiest feature of contemporary conflict, are changing rapidly and dramatically. This revealing book brings to light an international brotherhood of guerrillas, introducing us to their people and their concerns about family, religion, economics, law and order, and mythology.
Guerrillas is first-rate reporting and daring, riveting storytelling.