I Wouldn't Start From Here | Granta

  • Published: 01/08/2008
  • ISBN: 9781846271519
  • 129x20mm
  • 496 pages

I Wouldn’t Start From Here

Andrew Mueller

With considerable skill, Mueller skids around the globe from failed state to ravaged war zone to desolate no-man’s-land, from Beirut to Basra via Belfast and Bihac, to try to unpick why we humans seem so prone to plucking war from the jaws of peace, why so much that can go wrong does go wrong, over and over again, and how and why some conflicts suddenly, quietly, inexplicably seem to find themselves solved. It’s a surprisingly sunny book given the mire in which he finds himself. And it is a notably entertaining and eye-opening tour of the world’s moral basements in the vein of Holidays in Hell or Emergency Sex.

Reporting from the world's plague-spots, Mueller asks the questions the rest of us were far too busy being clever to think of. Think Douglas Adams meets Holidays in Hell

Michael Bywater

This book is full of the sort of elemental survival humour and remove-your-own-appendix directions crucial for travel in these absurdist times

Jonathan Kaplan

Andrew Mueller is a gung-ho Candide with a taste for places that it is wiser to avoid. IWSFH is graphic, comic, bemused and properly contemptuous of faith and ideology

Jonathan Meades

The Author

Andrew Mueller was born in Wagga Wagga, Australia in 1968, and has lived in London and hotels since 1990. He currently writes on various subjects for The Independent, Independent On Sunday, Guardian, Monocle, Arena, Uncut, High Life, New Humanist and anyone else who’ll have him. Mueller is also singer, songwriter and rhythm guitarist with The Blazing Zoos, widely regarded as one of the three or four dozen very best country & western groups in east London. www.andrewmueller.net

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