In 2005, after a six-year stint as a network war correspondent, Kevin Sites (who already had an active blog) made a deal with Yahoo! to spend one year traveling to all the world's conflict zones, posting what he saw and heard as he went. Aside from local "fixers" at each point who would secure interviews, translate, drive, etc., Sites worked alone, spending no more than a few weeks at each hot zone location, sending daily transmissions via his satellite modem-equipped laptop.Before he even left his Southern California base, Sites realized the difficulty of providing the full context and geopolitical impact of each conflict zone within such a limited time. He therefore narrowed his focus to telling personal stories in order to put "a human face" on conflict. The multimedia approach was helpful in this goal, as Sites provided short video clips and still photographs along with his text as well as links to other websites that would provide additional information about each area.
To his credit, Sites provides readers with a vivid narrative despite the absence of visual aids in book format. With prose that has the jittery immediacy of a handheld video camera, he manages to create indelible portraits of suffering and survival against extremely long odds. In Somalia, for example, he describes a scarred woman whose three-year-old daughter was crushed by the falling wreckage of a Black Hawk helicopter. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, he finds women who hide in banana trees to escape being raped by rebels who come looking for them every night. In Uganda, he discovers the legacy of war in an army of kidnapped children turned into soldiers and an entire population of people who walk for miles every night to urban areas so that they won't be captured and killed in their villages. In Iran, Sites profiles one of the country's two million heroin addicts, a man who injected "brown sugar" for two decades before cleaning up in a methadone clinic. In Chechnya, he describes a population suffering from collective post traumatic stress disorder and in Vietnam, three generations suffering the effects of Agent Orange. Any one of these stories could fill a book, but together they represent only a fraction of those Sites includes here.
Despite the strength of spirit and hope that accompanies many of these portraits, the cumulative effect of so much misery takes its toll on Sites. This is not and was never intended to be a feel-good book, but the relentlessness of war and human cruelty risks creating a feeling of numb helplessness. Sites himself admits as much. He becomes noticeably dispirited, if not entirely without optimism, by the end of his journey when he covers the 2006 Israel/Lebanon battle. Of course, it was to increase awareness that Sites took on the project in the first place and why he has documented that journey on the page. In this respect, In the Hot Zone is indeed a success.--Debra Ginsberg