The Age (Melbourne, Australia)
May 24, 2008 Saturday
First Edition
The Age of the Warrior;
NON FICTION
by Fiona Capp
The Age of the Warrior
Robert Fisk
Fourth Estate, $29.99
BRACING, PASSIONATE and defiant, veteran Middle East reporter Robert
Fisk has made a career out of speaking unpalatable truths.
Journalists, he says, are not supposed to express their anger about
what they witness. This pretence of objectivity is, he says, "the
great sickness of our Western press and television". He makes it his
mission to expose this "objectivity" for what it is – kowtowing to
political and media masters and capitulating to the rhetoric of
fear. The unashamed emotion driving Fisk’s writing is one of its great
strengths. But he doesn’t simply denounce those he disagrees with; he
provides solid reasons for doing so. The collection opens with a
superb analysis of the relevance of Shakespeare to modern-day warfare
in the Middle East, and ranges from the Armenian genocide to "Da Vinci
shit" – his response to the film The Da Vinci Code. Yet one senses
that all the death he has witnessed weighs heavily on him. Painfully
hard-earned wisdom informs all he writes.