Petrou’s clandestine travels in Iran and his visits with that country’s diverse and far-flung underground of brave democrats, intellectuals and dissidents provide an exceedingly rare insight into the workings of the Khomeinist police state... But it’s Petrou’s dispatches from the front lines of the “first war” of the book’s title, the freedom struggle that Canadians usually call the “war in Afghanistan,” that lend the book its heft.
"Petrou is a wonderful storyteller and the book is replete with intriguing vignettes of the multitude of people he worked with, and against." (Literary Review of Canada
…a searing medley of gritty narratives… (Oxford Today, Alumni magazine (UK)
One of Canada’s leading foreign correspondents presents a searing medley of gritty narratives drawn from a decade of reporting across the greater Middle East... The human narratives, in their unpredictable and subjective particularity, are collectively compelling. (Oxford University Alumni 2013-05-00)
About the Author
Michael Petrou, an award-winning senior writer at Maclean's
, has covered wars and conflicts across Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. He is the author of Renegades: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War
, and he holds a doctorate in modern history from the University of Oxford. Petrou lives in Ottawa.