TO SEE BEYOND

Elegant, erudite essays by immigrant and longtime war correspondent Badkhen.

Born in the Soviet Union and practiced in recounting conflict on the ground in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Sahel, Badkhen has a refined awareness of both the evil that humans can commit and the irony that often attends it. She writes, for instance, of a sojourn in a Malian city whose inhabitants, many fleeing an Islamist insurgency, have been kept safe by the Wagner Group, infamous for being “accused of war crimes in Ukraine, Syria, the Central African Republic…” The list goes on, including Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where her parents still live and experience a kind of neo-Stalinism that Stalin himself might have endorsed, having famously said, “One death is a tragedy, one million deaths is a statistic.” Badkhen’s essays often take in humankind’s more tragic tendencies, in the face of which, she writes, it’s difficult to think of hope as anything short of magical thinking—but “maybe magical thinking is precisely what has sustained us through hundreds of thousands of years of drought, epidemics, climate shifts, migration, floods, enslavement, war.” The very stuff she writes about, in other words, in “two decades of documenting the human condition in extremis.” Much of Badkhen’s collection has a commanding urgency, demanding that we look at the world as it is: beautiful but horrifying at the same time. In this, she is a fellow traveler of the late Barry Lopez, whom she evokes here as an expert chronicler of “moral erosion.” The moments when she finds beauty are often arresting, if sometimes swaddled in one fact too many (albeit it’s a good bet that no other war correspondent has studied up on the earwax of whales). And the moments in which she finds terror are memorable as well, more poetic than Svetlana Alexievich but just as closely observed.

A fine work of journalism and belles-lettres as moral witness.