In 2006, the journalists Jon Lee Anderson and his brother, Scott, both happened to be reporting stories from Lebanon. Israel had invaded the country in a bid to crush Hezbollah. Jon Lee was in Beirut, trying to learn what he could about a shadowy war. Scott was doing the same in the southern city of Tyre, where the Israelis had imposed a blanket curfew, threatening to shoot anything that moved.
Scott was traveling with the photographer Paolo Pellegrin to see what was happening at a hospital when a drone strike missed their vehicle by a matter of yards. The shock wave knocked all the buttons off Scott’s shirt and gave him a concussion. Blood was pouring out of his ear.
The frighteningly close call convinced the brothers that they needed a rule. “We have a kind of superstition, which is that it’s not good to be in the same war zone at the same time,” Jon Lee said. “And the one time we were, Scott nearly got killed.”
The Andersons were recounting this story in Scott’s New Jersey living room — comfortably far from a war zone, though finding them on the same continent, let alone in the same city, was a matter of fortuitous timing. Scott, 66, who lives in Jersey City, was leaving for a monthlong trip to Turkey with his teenage daughter in a few weeks; Jon Lee, 68, who lives with his wife in Dorset, England, was passing through New York to give a talk at the Americas Society before visiting his daughter in New Hampshire, where she was about to give birth.
It isn’t exactly common for two people from the same family to do the uncommon work of reporting from some of the world’s most dangerous hot spots — Jon Lee as a staff writer for The New Yorker, Scott as a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine. Nor is it common for siblings to have new books coming out in the same month. In another accident of fortuitous timing, Scott’s “King of Kings” and Jon Lee’s “To Lose a War” both publish in August.
“King of Kings” revisits the 1979 Iranian revolution and how it caught the American establishment unaware; “To Lose a War” traces more than two decades of American folly in Afghanistan. As different as their books are, the brothers share an abiding interest in America’s place in the world — along with a concern about how the country’s enormous might has led it to exacerbate, rather than alleviate, disaster.
If it’s the dream of every foreign correspondent to witness history as it’s made, it’s safe to say that few have lived that dream as long and intensely as the Anderson brothers have. Together, they figure they have reported from more than 60 countries over four decades.
Their unconventional careers flow from a highly unusual childhood. Their mother was an artist and children’s book writer. Their father worked for the U.S. Foreign Service in various capacities, including as an agricultural expert for U.S.A.I.D., a job that took him all over the world. (In the introduction to “The Quiet Americans,” his 2020 book about four C.I.A. spies, Scott writes that he is “fairly certain” their father wasn’t one.)
Scott and Jon Lee were born in California. Their oldest sister was born in Haiti. Another sister was adopted from Costa Rica. Their little sister was adopted from Taiwan. When the brothers were children, the family moved around the East Asian theaters of the Cold War: Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia. Growing up in a big, multiracial family, they remember their parents as liberal and hands off.
For Scott, the free-range parenting meant that he was also at the mercy of his big brother. “He used to beat me up all the time,” Scott said. “We hated each other.” Jon Lee smiled: “I loved Scott, but he hated me.”
Jon Lee started running away at an early age — not because he disliked home, but because he wanted to see what else was out there. He collected animals from his adventures: an iguana, a pangolin, two mongooses, a menagerie of armadillos. When he was 13, his parents (“long suffering,” he said) sent him to live with an aunt and uncle in Liberia for a year.
That aunt, Doris Coonrad, now 96 and living in California, told me how Jon Lee went off to East Africa for a few weeks on his own (he mentioned the sojourn in a personal essay last year for The New Yorker). “He could carry on conversations with anybody,” Coonrad said. “Anyway, Jon came back, and I met him at the airport and he had an owl, I think — he had something on his shoulder, which was typical.”
Scott, for his part, was much quieter, “kind of a loner,” he said. He was a history buff, obsessed with the Civil War. He became attuned to people’s gestures, to how much they communicated without language. Even now, he seemed content to let Jon Lee tell many of the stories, sitting back, his arms crossed in front of his chest — more of a listener than a talker.
While Jon Lee ran away, Scott wandered. They both noted Scott’s unerring sense of direction, his inability to get lost. At 14, he took a nine-month trip with his father in a VW camper, traveling from France to India with stops in Iran and Afghanistan. He later spent two months by himself in Thailand. The family he was supposed to stay with had left, so he was on his own: “It was great. I had a little bike and just tooled around Bangkok.”
Formal schooling was almost an afterthought. Scott went to high school in Florida and Jon Lee to high school in England. The brothers’ relationship took a decisive turn in the summer of 1975, when 16-year-old Scott was dispatched by their parents to Honduras, where Jon Lee had been helping a friend build a house. The family had received a breezy postcard from Jon Lee, which included a few words scribbled at the end about a nasty wound in his foot (“maybe gangrenous”), and so a resentful Scott was “press-ganged” into a rescue mission, only to arrive in Honduras and see that his brother’s foot had healed in the month since the postcard was sent.
The two ended up making the most of their time together, taking a rickety raft down the Patuca, roaming around Central America, nearly getting into a knife fight in a Salvadoran bar and peering over the rim of a Guatemalan volcano. In the 1980s, they co-wrote two books: One about the fascist infiltration of the World Anti-Communist League and another called “War Zones: Voices From the World’s Killing Grounds.”
“Really enticing title,” Jon Lee said dryly. They worked on their own projects after that. Scott, despondent after reporting on wartime atrocities, got an M.F.A. in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and went on to publish war-themed novels in addition to nonfiction. Jon Lee wrote several books, including a landmark biography of Che Guevara, and eventually landed at The New Yorker. Having a child in 2008 made Scott wary about returning to war zones. (He and his wife have since separated.) “On the contrary, I had a family and that pushed me into war,” said Jon Lee, whose three children are now in their 30s. “I just escalated.”
He meant this only half in jest. The photographer Samantha Appleton, who first worked with Jon Lee in Iraq, said that what struck her about the experience was “his instinct to be on the street all the time” and pay attention to what people were saying far from centers of power. “Jon Lee was not dazzled by trinkets that are held out in front of a journalist,” she said, referring to the official narratives pushed by government mouthpieces. Keeping an eye on the street was especially valuable “in a power vacuum, and he’s almost always working in power vacuums.”
Afghanistan is a case in point. Jon Lee’s experience there extends back decades, to the 1980s, when the Mujahedeen were fighting the Soviets. He published “The Lion’s Grave” in 2002, after the Taliban had fallen and the American mission seemed a “qualified success.” His new book comes out with the Taliban back in power.
“I think the fact that I’m an American but someone who lives outside has given me the possibility of seeing my country both for what it is and for what it thinks it is,” Jon Lee said. In so many places, “we go barreling in, and then we just go slinking out, and then they cease to exist for a generation.”
After several hours of conversation, we had covered only a sampling of the brothers’ eventful lives, and so friends and colleagues tried to fill in the gaps. Had I heard about the time that Scott and his fellow war reporter Sebastian Junger went looking for a war criminal in the Balkans and got mistaken for C.I.A.? How about the time that Jon Lee got scurvy?
Their friend Matt McAllester, formerly a foreign correspondent for Newsday, told me that even for someone who has known the brothers for two decades, the constant sense of astonishment was standard. He had started reading “King of Kings” only to learn that Scott, who at the age of 18 just happened to be working as a special aide to the treasury secretary, was in Washington during the shah’s visit in 1977 and got caught in the violent melee that erupted outside the White House between the shah’s supporters and opponents.
“There’s just a lot there with those guys, in the sense of just having extraordinarily textured lives,” McAllester said. “Like, how many more stories could you two guys possibly have?”
Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times.
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