No Friends but the Mountains: Dispatches from the World's Violent Highlands

Drawing upon her professional experience as a conflict journalist, Matloff (journalism, Columbia Univ.; Home Girl) explores the connections between contemporary mountain regions prone to conflict and the ethos of the people who inhabit them. Through thoughtful vignettes, she weaves personal narratives alongside relevant historical and present-day circumstances to relate regional stories that consistently refer to and affirm the global tale she seeks to tell. Seemingly influenced by fellow political travel writer Robert D. Kaplan's penchant for emphasizing geography to explain larger geopolitical, socioeconomic, and cultural phenomena, (e.g., his The Revenge of Geography and In Europe's Shadow), Matloff successfully ties together disparate mountain areas and cultures into a cohesive landscape of highlander have-nots that face both internal and external pressures affecting their homeland and way of life.