Reed took the 128 color pictures and Ajami wrote the 47 pages of text in this vivid survey of Beirut as it exists today. As ever, Ajami writes with a rare lyrical skill (especially notable since his English is a learned language). Having grown up in Beirut, he presents his overview of the city's history with a bitter fondness. Not surprisingly, Ajami is best at evoking the ironies and foibles of Beirut's ruin. 'By the early 1980s, in the city that had parodied Paris there was now a parody of Iran's theocratic revolution; parody had replaced parody." "No one could really 'win' in Beirut. In the mid-1970s, the combatants fought over beachfront hotels, over once-proud places. A decade later, they were fighting over shells of gutted buildings."
To a reader familiar with Lebanon's fate but lacking in firsthand experience of the war, Reed's photographs have power and immediacy. A number of pictures show gunmen, but most do not. The gunmen wear expressions exactly like those of the gang members that maraud in large American cities — violent, arrogant, and profoundly uncivilized. The rest of the population appears either to be cowering or desperately pretending that the gunmen do not exist. As a result, even pictures of the most normal events (of bathers, of a christening, of a fashion show) reek of falsehood. The gunmen define all: the central reality as well as the pretense that that reality can be denied.
In a century in which most horrors have been perpetrated by an over-powerful state, Beirut: City of Regrets provides an awful reminder that this is not the only danger. Anarchy can also lead to tragedy. The numbers of casualties may be smaller, but the viciousness is no less horrifying.
