Volume 50, Number 19 · December 4, 2003
Murder in Karachi
By William Dalrymple
A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of My Husband, Danny Pearl
by Mariane Pearl, with Sarah Crichton
Scribner, 278 pp., $25.00
Who Killed Daniel Pearl?
by Bernard-Henri Lévy, translated from the French by James X. Mitchell
Melville House, 454 pp., $25.95
Karachi is the saddest of cities. It is a South Asian Beirut: a city on the sea, rich and almost glamorous in parts; but also a monument to hatred among different sectarian and ethnic groups, and to the failure of a civic society. It is a city at war as much with itself as with the outside world. The most populous metropolis in Pakistan, Karachi is a profoundly troubled place, intermittently engulfed in terrible bouts of killing and kidnapping. It is a city where the police sit huddled in sandbag emplacements for their own safety, and where the foreign consulates now resemble great fortified Crusader castles—which is how the people of Karachi look on them: the unwelcome, embattled bridgeheads of alien powers.
Review, 4842 words
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