Schmidle, Nicholas. To Live Or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan. Henry Holt and Company, 2010.
Reason read: Pakistan’s first female prime minister was assassinated in December 2007. Read in her memory. Interestingly enough, at the end of To Live or To Perish Forever, Schmidle gives a play by play of the events leading up to Benazir Bhutto’s death.
Schmidle was a mere twenty-nine years old when he and his wife, Rikki, fled Pakistan. His story, To Live or to Perish Forever opens with their rushed evacuation out of the country.
There is a stereotype surrounding reporters. Everyone knows reporters are brazen. Reporters are hungry to scoop the competition. Reporters will stop at nothing to get a good story. Schmidle alludes to this when describing interviews with outlawed Islamic militant groups or his relationship with pro-Taliban leaders. Schmidle implies this when he writes about Daniel Pearl, a reporter murdered just four year prior to Schmidle’s own story. He hints of it when he is allowed back into Pakistan just eight short months after his exile from the country.
I cannot imagine why anyone would want to put themselves willingly in an area dangerous enough to require a guard; especially an Islamabad town where you know the phones are being tapped and people are being kidnapped and murdered almost every single day. The idea that if you do not like you current political leader, you can just oust him by taking to the streets in violent protest. Schmidle’s courage to tell a terroristic story is to be commended.
Line I liked, “Stay in Pakistan long enough and you immediately become paranoid” (p 138). This sentence makes me paranoid because I do not know when “long enough” becomes “immediate.” Sounds like a trick to me.
Book trivia: the title of the book comes from a 1933 pamphlet written by Rahmat Ali.
Author fact: Schmidle has a website but it is not kept up to date. If you are curious, you can visit it here.
Book trivia: To Live Or to Perish Forever has a small smattering of black and white photographs throughout the text.
Playlist: Ravi Shankar, George Harrison, and “Que Sera, Sera”.
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Sojourns in South Asia – Pakistan” (p 215).
~*LunaSea*~ 