No Friends but the Mountains

Mountainous regions are home to only ten percent of the world’s population yet host a strikingly disproportionate share of the world’s conflicts—and as the veteran war correspondent Judith Matloff argues, the drugs, terrorism, and instability cascading down the mountainside affect us all. Traveling to conflict zones across the world, she introduces us to Albanian teenagers involved in ancient blood feuds, Mexican peasants hunting down violent poppy growers, and Jihadists who have resisted the Russian military for decades, among others. A work of political travel writing in the vein of Ryszard Kapuscinski and Robert Kaplan, NO FRIENDS BUT THE MOUNTAINS is an indelible portrait of the conflicts that have unexpectedly shaped our world.