Radar is committed to all forms of art and entertainment and as such, will pick one book as a reading recommendation every week. This week, Radar’s “Lit” pick is “No Friends but the Mountains: Dispatches from the World’s Violent Highlands” by Judith Maltoff.

Courtesy of Hachette Book Group

Written by acclaimed journalist and conflict reporting professor at Columbia University Judith Matloff, “No Friends but the Mountains” seeks to explain why armed conflicts disproportionately take place in mountainous regions of the world. Readers follow Matloff as she traverses the world, traveling to some of the most volatile and unstable regions, among them Kashmir in the Himalayas, and visiting the infamous FARC insurgency in Colombia. She speaks to locals as well as other journalists and scholars in the region to further understand why some of the most dangerous wars are waged in the highest areas of the world, despite a fraction of the global population living there. Matloff explains how these conflicts affect us all, proposing that mountain people be a culture of their own and left to live as they wish; the process to that proposal makes for a thoroughly engaging read.