Michael Maher is the author of Indonesia. An Eyewitness Account (Viking), described by the Wall Street Journal as ‘’an expertly told tale,'' featuring ''great pen portraits assembled by a reporter with an eye for the telling detail.’’ The Sydney Morning Herald said “[Maher’s] descriptions of the events and the people involved in them and his recounting of momentous events seen from within bullet, baton and tear-gas range make for a powerful read’’ and the Melbourne Age newspaper described ‘Eyewitness’ as ‘’an important book which humanizes the Indonesian story … a lively, highly readable and at times gripping account of the great drama that is still being played out in [Australia’s] largest, most important neighbor. ‘’ The Far Eastern Economic Review declared the book to be a: ‘’… racy, eyewitness account (which) sets out to give the armchair viewer a stripped down, nuts and bolts version. If you want an explanation of what happened and why – stripped of mystery – this is the book.’’
The Road to Chaman.
Warriors, bandits and smugglers have long been drawn to Chaman, a dusty frontier town on Pakistan's border with Afghanistan. Michael Maher travelled there as another war enveloped this unruly outpost.
(A dispatch from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border shortly after 9/11/2001, published in The Bulletin and Newsweek magazines)
Danny Lyon. The Photographer Who Became an Outlaw.
Danny Lyon is an American original. Over the course of 50 years he's made photographs and films not as a spectator but as a participant, fully immersing himself in subjects such as the civil rights movement, the prison system, motorcycle gangs and the Latino community of New Mexico.
Vietnam. In the Footsteps of Graham Greene.
(from the book Travellers’ Tales: Stories from the ABC’s Foreign Correspondents)
Each year, from 1951 to 1955, the celebrated British writer Graham Greene escaped Europe’s frigid winters for the alluring sultriness of Vietnam. There, this novelist and occasional correspondent for London’s Sunday Times gave himself up to French Indochina’s intrigues: its wars, its beauty and its vices. Especially its vices. Michael Maher travelled to Vietnam to retrace his footsteps.
Portraits of Tepito. The Day of the Dead in Mexico City’s barrio bravo.
American Dreams
Peter Carey’s literary journey has spanned more than 50 years. He’s one of only four writers to have won Britain’s Man-Booker Prize twice and has been awarded
Australia’s Miles Franklin Prize three times. Now the New York-based writer has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, one of the highest accolades that can be bestowed upon an artist in the United States.
My Neighbor Dominique Strauss-Kahn (BBC)
In 2011, the man destined to become France’s next President moved in next door to the author while he awaited possible sexual assault charges. When Dominque Strauss-Kahn moves into your neighborhood it's a lot like the circus coming to town. With him, however, came not a troupe of harlequins, trapeze artists and lion tamers but a just as colorful collection of retainers, sightseers and media hounds.
