Andrew Mueller's essay collection was released earlier this year and became one of the books that I could not put down. Although published for an adult audience, I included it in my March column as I think it would be an excellent choice for older teens interested in learning about the world in general and international relations (and war) in particular. From my review:

From the always topical indy publisher Soft Skull Press, this collection of essays written by the rock critic/foreign correspondent/travel writer Andrew Mueller is essential reading for anyone interested in knowing more about geopolitical relations. Best of all, Mueller is devastatingly funny and asks the questions we're too polite to ask ourselves. (In one exchange in the former Soviet republic of Georgia he asks his cab driver, “Why do you people always drive like fucking idiots?” The response is classic: “We drive like this… because in Georgia, life is short.”) In both his writing style and subject matter Mueller is a role model for 21st century journalism. Forget about the cable news; if you want to know how it is in the world’s troublespots (and in a few peaceful locales), then Mueller is the one to ask.

His essay about a visit to Kabul in 2003 includes an exchange with a local describing the bleakness of life under the Taliban: “They outlawed all the senses. There was nothing to look at, nothing to listen to, nobody you could touch. Even the food didn’t taste of anything.” Mueller also recounts several visits to Iraq including one in 2003 where he ponders that “…invading an entire country seemed a klutzy way to get one guy out of his job.” Later in the book he recalls a long visit to the West Bank in late 2005 where the issue of Israeli settlements came up repeatedly in conversations with both Palestinians and Israelis, but again Mueller can’t help asking (of both sides) the most basic question:

"If the East Timorese, having won independence, started encouraging their people to build homes in West Timor, we’d suspect LSD in the water supply. If Kosovo, when independence came, announced an intention to help itself to choice hilltops in Serbia, the international community would suggest, forcibly, that they pull their heads in. It seemed a no-brainer. The Israelis had a homeland. Why didn’t the Israelis live in it?"

A lot of readers find important topics difficult to read about as authors of those subjects can tend to be pedantic and, to be blunt, desperately dull. Andrew tackles all of his subjects with a sharp, biting, and indeed often very funny style that is both riveting and refreshing. His book continues to be one that I refer to and think about and something that in these times I think there is no excuse for not reading. What follows is an exchange between Andrew and myself over a period of several months where topics ranged the Congo to Ireland. He's a wonderful writer covering important subjects and most certainly an author to watch.

CM : What people have you interviewed in the past who still stay with you?

AM: Lots, but probably not the ones who might be expected. Though some of my encounters with the famous and infamous have been memorable, they're not the ones I still wonder about - because it's usually easy to find out what they're up to, and because they're either i) capable of fending for themselves, or ii) undeserving of much sympathy. It's always the - for want of a less pejorative term - "ordinary" folks, reacting to extraordinary (for
which read insane or grotesque) circumstances with courage, grace and dignity. A handy representation of such people will always be the telephone engineers I met in Baghdad just after the capture of the city in 2003. Their place of work was, inevitably, a bombed, burned and looted ruin, but they were getting dressed and coming in every morning on time anyway, willing to put in a day, tidying up as best they could, hoping things would get better eventually. They were just plain decent, kind, honest, courteous chaps, which increasingly strikes me as the most commendable of accomplishments. I really hope they're all okay.

CM: How hard is it to walk away from people in a circumstance like that one (and many others you describe) and never know what happens next? Has this ever affected your decision to pursue a story? (Or made you feel differently about a story after you wrote it?)

AM: Whether or not this marks me as some sort of sociopath I don't know, but it really doesn't trouble me that much. Walking away, after all, is what I'm always going to have to do, on the grounds that I don't live wherever it is I happen to be working. Which isn't to say that I never think of the people I meet again - I do think of them, often, and indeed some people I've met on assignments have become and stayed friends. It's increasingly the case, though - for everybody, not just journalists - that if you're really that interested in what someone you once met is doing, it's easy enough to find out. What I mostly feel about about anyone in any story I've written is hope I told their story - or, at least, my perception of it - well, and honestly.

CM: I was particularly struck by your interview in Northern Ireland with Michael Stone (and your follow-up later on where he ended up). After talking to so many people about conflict and war is there anything anyone says about why they fight that has surprised you?

AM: Not really. The range of things for which people claim to fight – their people, their country, their God - is actually pretty limited. The range of reasons why people actually fight I'm sure is much wider, but the difficulty is that nobody ever admits what it really is, whether it's leaders dressing wars in highflown rhetoric about freedom, or guerillas representing a turf war as a religious crusade or ideological struggle, or grunts on the ground pledging allegiance to some flag or other when the truth is that they're there because they enjoy a scrap. This is the great unsayable, I suspect - that we have wars because people like them, on the grounds that war makes people feel important and useful. I don't exclude journalists from this assessment, obviously.

CM: The essays in your book are often about people who aren't generally well known. How do you find your interview subjects and is there a plan before you talk to them or do the interviews develop organically?

AM: There's no simple answer to this. Most stories I launch upon with at least a vague idea of who I want to speak to when I get there, but I think it's important to leave time and room to be surprised - to resist, in short, writing the story in your head before you clear customs (the first Albania chapter in the book is a cautionary tale of such temptations). I take a similar approach to formal sit-down interviews, which is to say that I make sure I know enough that the subject understands that I know what I'm talking about, but I rarely plan any questions in advance, and certainly never go in with a list on a notepad. Again, it's about allowing room for the unexpected.

CM: I know you are a travel writer and music critic but the essays in your book are very political and a lot blunter than most when it comes to saying what you really think (why do they shoot up in the air in Palestine, why do they drive so badly in Georgia, etc.). Do you think of yourself as apolitical writer and have you ever felt like you need to censor your opinions about one of the places you visited?

AM: I've never censored my opinions for print - I don't see the point. The idea of "objective" journalism is self-evidently ridiculous: all you can do is call it like you see it, and if someone sees it differently - which they will - then they're welcome to say so. The only rule I try to adhere to is not writing anything after the event which I wouldn't or didn't say to the people on the ground when I was there. And I have to say that if you turn up
displaying a basic level of genuine and respectful curiosity, people are usually willing to have the argument in good spirit - unless zealous to the point of dementia, opinionated people enjoy a good row. The first time I traveled to Lebanon to spend time with Hizbollah in late 2001, it was essentially a week-long argument with them, on the grounds that I disagree vehemently with just about everything they say, do and stand for. I sent them the original magazine piece when it ran, as I'd promised, and they emailed back saying they'd really enjoyed it - they said they didn't agree with much of what I'd concluded, but I'd been straight with them, honest in my reporting, and that was fine with them.

And everybody's a political writer, whether they're trying to be or not.

CM: What country (or countries) that you visited do you think are most misunderstood or misrepresented in the West?

AM: At the risk of stating the inevitable, the Middle East. The leaders of the region are, without much in the way of exception, varying combinations of crazy, foolish and crooked. But the people are, by and large, charming, friendly, curious, funny, energetic, enthusiastic, hopelessly likable and limitlessly hospitable. They remind me - and I'm really not trying to be funny - of Americans.

CM: Reading your collection is almost dizzying - it is hard to believe that one person could cover so much territory. You allude a bit to difficulties in your personal life in a few of the essays. Do you want to continue as a foreign correspondent and what places would you like to write more about?

AM: The territory covered in the book isn't the half of it - for every one of the stories and journeys in there, there's at least another two that didn't make the cut, whether for reasons of thematic constancy, or concerns that the finished volume was going to require a forklift to get it out of shops.

It's getting harder to do this kind of thing, though, on the grounds that publications are growing increasingly reluctant to spend money sending writers places. I sympathise slightly - especially in tough times, it doubtless feels hard to justify dispatching some hack to, say, the Democratic Republic of Congo to write about a war nobody cares about, and stumping up for the associated airfares, hotels, translators, transport, expenses and insurance, when you can fill the space more cheaply and profitably by getting interns to recycle gossip about film stars. But I'd like to think that enough people are interested in why the world is the way it is to make it worth everyone's while.

I'd like to keep at it, yes. The where doesn't really matter - any place is a story. And the personal life is what it is - or, at least at time of writing, what it isn't. I'm still kind of uneasy about those parts of the book. During the interminable final edit, they were in and out more often than limbs at a hokey-cokey marathon. They eventually stayed because the friends I showed it to liked them, and also because whenever I've read that much of someone else's journeying, I've ended up interested in them as well, what they looking for, or trying to get away from - generally, what manner of bees were besetting their bonnet. At the time I put the book together, that was it, for me, and so it stayed.

CM: Do you think the reason it's getting harder to support coverage of these types of stories is a case of people not caring about wars (or people) halfway around the world, or is it more that we been "trained" not to care?

In the U.S. in particular we are very focused on our own problems and how the world affects us - not the other way around. I know foreign correspondents aren't cheap but I guess what I wonder is if we can afford not to have them - and not to know the real truth from the ground. Why do you suppose this shift away from knowing has taken place? Is it really just about money or is it also about fooling the public into ignoring the truth?

AM: It's supply and demand, like everything else. There really is very little demand for news about the proverbial far away countries of which we know nothing - go to the website of any quality news agency or highbrow newspaper, and look at their most read/forwarded stories and you'll find that celebrity sex and skateboarding meerkats have it all over pestilence, war, famine and death. So there's no particular imperative for publishers to
go to the considerable trouble and expense of supplying large amounts of foreign reportage. My somewhat uncharitable belief is that much of what foreign reporting it is published is there as kind of a placebo, in that people like the idea that they're enlightened enough to buy a newspaper which carries this stuff, even if they personally ignore it as they leaf through to the gossip and trampolining foxes.

You don't need to fool anyone into ignoring this stuff - people, in the main, just don't give a damn about anything until it's inescapably their problem. Afghanistan is a wretchedly perfect case in point. From 1989 (when the USSR quit, and the US lost interest) to September 11th, 2001, its dreadful story was followed only by a few foreign policy wonks, adventurers who'd fallen in love with the place and the odd cleverdick feature writer, such as your correspondent, who mistook the Taliban for a Monty Python sketch. Afghanistan very briefly became a big deal, for obvious reasons, but getting on for eight years since the invasion of the place, with neither victory nor end in sight, people are just bored with it.

CM: What are your future plans?

AM: More books, hopefully. There should be more concrete news about a couple of such things shortly - interested parties should keep a watchful eye on www.andrewmueller.net, one finger jabbing furiously and repeatedly at the "Refresh" button. Also, I'm pondering the best means of inflicting "I'll Leave Quietly", the debut album by my band, The Blazing Zoos, upon the commonweal. On this front, as well, I hope to have news shortly. Otherwise, I continue my semi-regular round of lunches with television people. You never know.

CM: And if you could cover any story in the world right now, where you would want to be, and what would you like to be writing about?

Anywhere about anything, really. You always - and this is still the best thing about the job - learn something you hadn't known when you woke up that morning.

Andrew's book is on the list at the Guys Lit Wire Book Fair for Boys - it was bought the other day and will soon be enjoyed by boys in the LA County juvenile justice system who, I'm sure, will find a lot to learn from his travels around our all often dangerous world.