US book tour
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ANITA PRATAP'S ISLAND OF BLOOD WAS PUBISHED FALL OF 2003 IN THE UNITED STATES BY PENGUIN USA. WASHINGTON POST PUBLISHED A REVIEW JUST AHEAD OF HER TWO WEEK BOOK TOUR OF THE STATES STARTING SEPTEMBER 16.
EXCERPTS FROM WASHINGTON POST REVIEW OF ISLAND OF BLOOD:
By Chris Lehmann
The next time you see a pundit advertising his bold contrarian streak with some high-profile reversal of a cherished opinion, or a TV wag fearlessly laying into the excesses of a sitcom character or rap singer, consider the résumé of Anita Pratap.
A reporter for Sunday, India Today and other magazines, as well as a foreign correspondent for Time's Asian edition and CNN, Pratap has doggedly and carefully tracked some of the most hazardous stories on her beat -- and well beyond it -- over the past 20 years. Covering the harrowing Sri Lankan civil conflict that has raged for nearly two decades and killed more than 65,000 people, Pratap has gone to the sites of riots and guerrilla murders, gone underground for exclusive interviews with Tamil guerrilla leader Velupillai Prabhakaran (once posing as a hotel maid to pin down the elusive insurgent) and defied officials of both the Indian army and the Sri Lankan government in order to report, for example, on elections in which both the Tamil forces and their Sinhalese Marxist-Leninist counterparts targeted citizens for death simply for casting a ballot. Reporting the rise of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan for CNN in 1996 -- an assignment that netted her the prestigious George Polk Award for foreign TV reporting -- Pratap followed a workday regimen that must have seemed like a cruel practical joke.
Her crews had to shoot breathlessly delivered location stand-ups in a matter of seconds as she peered nervously out of the burka she donned for protective coloration, lest a passing Taliban contingent catch sight of her and literally shoot her for the crime of working while female. Closer to home, she has been dispatched to the landfall of Bangladesh's nightmarishly destructive 1988 cyclone, which claimed 25,000 lives, and assigned to investigate everything from Indian dowry killings to anti-Muslim Hindu riots in Delhi.
With these kinds of investigative feats to her credit, you might expect Pratap to write with the sort of tough, world-weary bluster that reporters in such trouble spots are notoriously prey to. Instead, she writes in a frankly personal and confessional voice, marveling at how she manages to cling to "the ordinary pleasures that the world takes for granted" amid the devastation she routinely encounters in her working life. Indeed, Pratap's center of gravity in her family and home life (she was for much of her career something yet more scandalous than a woman reporter to many of the revolutionary religious figures she has covered -- a single parent) serves to bring the calamities she describes into higher relief.
She reports, for example that Prabhakaran's eerily silent mien stirs to life her irrational childhood fear of snakes and remarks on how the horrifying substance of her reporting life can hover over the rounds of her domestic one: The "smell of decomposing bodies . . . clings to your nostrils long after you breathe the scent of your son back from play, long after you smell his freshly shampooed hair when you kiss him goodnight."
The book's title refers to the ordeals of Sri Lanka, and Pratap's vivid and wrenching reporting on the country's troubles justly take up more than half of the material collected in "Island of Blood." Pratap has obvious sympathy for Prabhakaran and the Tamil rebels, even as she's able to report unflinchingly on their brutal terrorist tactics and political miscalculations. Most of all, she powerfully evokes the senselessness of so much political violence in an undeveloped and desperately poor Sri Lankan society. When Prabhakaran insists that he cannot compromise on Eelam, his vision of a separate Tamil homeland, because he has led so many of his recruits to their death in the cause, Pratap marvels that "he didn't see the conundrum he was in -- by fighting for the dead, he was engineering the death of the living. . . . I told him that at the rate he was going, it would not be Eelam but a graveyard he would create. If Eelam finally dawned, expatriate Tamils would rejoice but by then, most Tamils in their homeland would be six feet under."
Anita Pratap's witness to some of the most grim and heartbreaking events in a corner of the world that, until very recently, Americans felt little need to acquaint themselves with. And now that events have conspired to tangle our comparatively privileged lives in the same skein of troubles, we can also benefit from her reflection that her career in journalism has succeeded in "putting my life into perspective" and in underlining "how important it is to safeguard [life], to nurture, value and enjoy the giving and the receiving of it." Not the sort of counsel we're conditioned to hearing from a battle-hardened foreign correspondent, but welcome and timely nonetheless.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company