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God Cried
By Tony Clifton and Catherine Leroy, London: Quartet Books Ltd., 1983. 141 pp. $29.95
Tony Clifton is a journalist who has plied his trade in various parts of the world, among them Biafra, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Saigon, Iran and in Beirut. Catherine Leroy is a photojournalist who has done the same in Viet Nam, Afghanistan, Africa, Cyprus, Iran and in Lebanon. Both have won awards for their reporting and photography.
Together they have produced a book that is stunning in its photography and searing in its prose. Catherine Leroy's selection of photographs move the reader around Beirut from the beginning of the Israeli siege during the summer of 1982, to the departure of the PLO and the massacres of Sabra and Shatila in September.
Clifton makes a significant point, which I happen to agree with, and which I have made a number of times in discussing the Israeli invasion. The massacres at Sabra and Shatila drew attention away from the larger crime committed by the Israelis in its grossly inhumane butchery all during the summer.
Bitterness and Passion
Although Clifton gives deserved credit to Leroy's excellent photography, it is his bitter and passion-filled prose which carries the book and makes it almost required reading for anyone interested in the Mideast, or, for that matter, in humanity.
It is an...