Globe Corner Blogs

On Sept 10th, the White House announced that Army Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta (one of the soldiers profiled in Sebastian Junger‘s most recent book War) will become the first American soldier since the Vietnam War to receive the Medal of Honor non-posthumously, the nation’s highest award for valor in combat. Giunta was honored for his courage in pulling two wounded soldiers to safety while under enemy fire, and then single-handedly rescuing a third critically wounded squad-mate who was being dragged away from the battle by Taliban fighters. He is just one of the many soldiers of Battle Company whom the reader meets in Junger’s gripping and immersive account of his year embedded with a paratroop company in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan.  The section of War that describes the firefight for which then-specialist Giunta received the Medal of Honor occurs mid-way through the book and showcases Junger’s in-depth prose style. Continue Reading »

Yemen--by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

This past Monday evening I attended a Harvard-sponsored forum, moderated by acclaimed British travel writer and diplomat Rory Stewart. He is the author of Prince of the Marshes, about his year as a provincial governor in southern Iraq after the US-led invasion in 2003, and The Places In Between, which chronicles Stewart’s walk across Afghanistan shortly after the fall of the Taliban regime. Stewart is currently a professor at the JFK School of Government here in Cambridge and was eager to moderate a talk given by an author he had long admired but never met: Tim Mackintosh-Smith, a Thomas Cook Travel Award-winning author (for his travelogue Yemen-The Unknown Arabia). Mackintosh-Smith spoke about his long obsession with the 14th century Islamic scholar and world traveler Ibn Battutah and how the author’s unique views of the Middle East have been informed by the last quarter-century he has spent living in the Yemeni capital of Sa’na.

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