Laura of Arabia.

• Author: McEvers, Kelly
• Position: Don't Be Afraid of the Bullets: An Accidental War Correspondent in Yemen - Book review

Don't Be Afraid of the Bullets: An Accidental War Correspondent in Yemen

by Laura Kasinof

Arcade Publishing, 304 pp.

When Yemen fell into chaos, most foreign correspondents were kept out. The only reliable news came from a few intrepid young Western freelancers who spoke the language, lived like locals, and managed to stay in the country.

Remember the Arab Spring? It's December 2010, a Tunisian street vendor sets himself on fire, and a few months later tens of millions of Arab kids are crowding the streets and squares in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, and Syria, demanding the fall of dictators and the establishment of democratically elected governments? For those of us who covered it, it was the story of a lifetime, a swell of euphoria and promise in a region that for so long had known only oppression.

In a few of these places, dictators did fall. But by now it's hard to remember that those were good times. Now, nearly four years after the uprisings began, some countries are struggling to rebuild (Tunisia), some have seen counter-revolutions that have set them back to their authoritarian ways (Egypt), some have continued the struggle (Bahrain), and others have devolved into chaos and even war (Syria, Libya, Yemen). Now more than ever seems the right time to step back and ask, "How did this happen?"

A handful of analysts and correspondents are beginning to answer that question in book form. But up until now, the stories of a few of these countries' struggles have remained untold. That's because in some places, namely Yemen, the ruling elite did everything in its power to keep the storytellers out. Correspondents like myself were turned away at the airport or even kicked out of the country with no notice. This left the job of telling Yemen's story to Yemeni activists and citizen journalists, and to the few intrepid Western freelancers who spoke the language, lived like locals, and managed to stay in the country.

Here was a country that was considered to be a U.S. ally, a place where the United States launched drone strikes against a menacing al-Qaeda affiliate and spent hundreds of millions of dollars to combat terrorism--and the only information we could get was from a few men and women in their twenties who in most cases had never been foreign correspondents. Still, they not only pulled it off, but they brought us the story in a way I would argue we--overworked, overcommitted correspondents at major news outlets--would not have been...