Jon Lee Anderson is an American biographer, author, investigative reporter, war correspondent and staff writer for The New Yorker, reporting from war zones such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Uganda, Israel, El Salvador, Ireland, Lebanon, Iran, and throughout the Middle E.
Background
The son of Joy Anderson, a children"s book author and University of Florida teacher, and of John Anderson, a diplomat and agricultural adviser for United States Agency for International Development and the Peace Corps, Anderson was raised and educated in South of Korea, Colombia, Taiwan, Indonesia, Liberia, England, and the United States.
Career
Anderson has also written for The New York Times, Harper"s, Life, and The Nation. Anderson has profiled political leaders such as Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, and Augusto Pinochet. Anderson began working as a reporter in 1979 for the Lima Times in Peru.
During the 1980s he covered Central America, first for the syndicated columnist Jack Anderson and later for Time magazine.
Anderson is also the author of a biography of the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara called Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, first published in 1997. While conducting research for the book in Bolivia, he discovered the hidden location of Guevara"s burial from where his skeletal remains were exhumed in 1997 and returned to Cuba.
Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life has received widespread acclaim as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and many reprints. In her 1997 critique of the book, United States. author Jane Franklin claims "Anderson never quite communicates an understanding of why Guevara remains such a powerful presence.
Relying too much on secondary sources for his knowledge of Cuban history, he fails to grasp the nature of the revolution for which Guevara, Fidel Castro and so many others were willing to die." Conversely, author Peter Canby states, "Anderson does a masterly job in evoking Che"s complex character, in separating the man from the myth and in describing the critical role Che played in one of the darkest periods of the cold war.
Ultimately, however, the strength of his book is in its wealth of detail."
In the Washington Monthly, Matthew Harwood"s review of The Fall of Baghdad was full of praise, "his crisp and lush prose reads more like a work of literature than like reportage. But for all its literary beauty, the book"s real power lies in its narrative strategy".