Black Hawk Down

"As a journalist who rarely leaves my desk, I don’t get an opportunity to do much reportage – but I get a vicarious thrill from reading it. Some of my favourite journalism books are examples of sustained reporting about a single subject – The Studio by John Gregory Dunne, for instance, and American Ground by William Langewiesche – but I don’t think I’ve enjoyed a book of reportage more than Black Hawk Down . What’s so great about it is that it describes a humiliating military defeat [the 1993 battle of Mogadishu in Somalia], and yet the American soldiers featured in its pages emerge as stone-cold heroes. It’s a familiar story – the lion-hearted fighting men let down by faulty equipment and incompetent generals. The Ridley Scott movie really doesn’t do it justice."