Many thanks to Hannah Catabia for her research work in the U.S., to Stephanie Freid for her research and interview assistance in Israel and to Mohammed Jalizadi for his efforts on my behalf in northern Iraq.
I want to express my gratitude to the Nieman Foundation for the fellowship opportunity that afforded me a paid year to struggle and reflect and eventually complete this difficult, emotional and cathartic project. Specifically I’m grateful to my colleague and friend Audra Ang, who tracked down the therapist who succeeded in derailing my plans for martyrdom on the twin altars of self-absorption and self-indulgence.
I’m extremely fortunate to have a very supportive imprint in Harper Perennial; my friend and editor Amy Baker is as encouraging of my efforts as she is forgiving of my lapsed deadlines. She made this a better book. And also with the Harper Perennial team, much appreciation to editor Michael Signorelli for taking the project handoff seamlessly and getting it across the finish line, and to production editor Mary Beth Constant and copyeditor Aja Pollock, who transformed this sometimes unwieldy manuscript from a jumble of words into a readable format where verb tenses actually exist in their proper time and place.
Finally, my thanks to my wife, Anita—whose unqualified support and example of courage and perseverance in the face of adversity inspire me and who is now helping me exercise muscle memory in the habit of trying to do the right thing daily.
I’d like to leave readers with this last passage, which I first read in Chris Hedges’s book
“We are tempted to reduce life to a simple search for happiness. Happiness, however, withers if there is no meaning. But to live only for meaning—indifferent to all happiness—makes us fanatic, self-righteous, and cold. It leaves us cut off from our own humanity and the humanity of others. We must hope for grace, for our lives to be sustained by moments of meaning and happiness, both equally worthy of human communion.”
KEVIN SITES has spent the past decade reporting on global war and disaster for ABC, NBC, CNN, and Yahoo! News. In 2005, he became Yahoo!’s first correspondent and covered every major conflict in the world in a single year for his website,
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Cover design by Richard Ljoenes
Cover photograph by Lucian Read
THE THINGS THEY CANNOT SAY. Copyright © 2013 by Kevin Sites. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Epub Edition FEBRUARY 2013
ISBN: 9780062099228
ISBN 978-0-06-199052-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
13 14 15 16 17 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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