Timed for release with the tenth anniversary of 9/11, Michelle Shephard’s Decade of Fear: Reporting from Terrorism’s Grey Zone ploughs through the world of terrorism over the decade since. Shephard, the Toronto Star’s national security correspondent, travelled widely through the hotbeds of discontent from Pakistan’s federally administered tribal agencies to Mogadishu and on through the no man’s land of Yemen gathering material for this compelling volume. She was fearless and intrepid in following leads and tracking down radical ideologues, then worming her way into their reality. She finds the guilty among the innocent and the innocent among the guilty.
One can taste the sand between one’s teeth, so vivid is Shephard’s language and so compelling her interlocutors. She presents them largely as they are, ideologues ready to die for a cause while offering the coffee and...
Michael Bell is the Paul Martin Senior Scholar in International Diplomacy at the University of Windsor and co-chair of the Jerusalem Old City Initiative. A career foreign service officer, he served as Canada’s ambassador to Jordan, Egypt and Israel.
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