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 "A gung-ho Candide with a taste for places it is wiser to avoid. . . the reports collected in 'I Wouldn't Start From Here' are graphic, comic, bemused and properly contemptuous of faith and ideology."
- Jonathan Meades, Books of the Year, Evening Standard
"An utterly sui generis report from the world's plague-spots."
- Michael Bywater, Books of the Year, New Statesman
"I can think of no more entertaining companion on a perilous journey than the ever hopeful, wildly optimistic yet clear-thinking Andrew Mueller."
- Rory MacLean, The Guardian
"A tour-de-force of hilarious, harrowing and ultimately enlightening reportage that will remind readers of the work of P.J. O'Rourke, Jon Ronson and David Foster Wallace."
- The Washington Times
"Unafraid to portray the world's warring people not just as victims and sufferers of legitimate grievances, but also as bloody-minded bastards and ill-informed fools."
- The Kathmandu Post
"A mix of dark humour and incisive political discourse."
- CNN Go
"His sardonic, self-deprecating perspective makes for unstuffy company."
- The Los Angeles Times
"Peppered with trenchant observations that reflect a nimble, cut-to-the-chase practicality, Mueller's interviews with everyone from terrorist warlords to international peacemakers are refreshingly irreverent yet astute."
- Booklist
"Travel writing in the danger zone that maintains its hipness and humanity."
- George Dunford, Books of the Year, Readings Monthly
"An addition to the genre founded by P.J. O'Rourke's 'Holidays In Hell', but it is one that pushes the boundaries."
- The Australian
"Mueller is the embodiment of what can happen with a fire in the belly and a desire to write out loud."
- Australian Book Review
"Mueller's travel writing is as incisive and entertaining as anything he's ever written about music."
- TNT
"A joy."
- Financial Times
"Delightfully laconic."
- The New Statesman
"Alternately chilling, funny and surprising, there's some great reportage here as Mueller struggles to reach an understanding of the world, quizzing the highest minister and the lowliest peasant."
- The Glasgow Herald
"His acerbic wit is matched by true empathy. . . we need this kind of gonzo journalism more than ever."
- Wanderlust
"Mueller spins what could have been the grimmest geopolitics into the finest black comedy. Like a print version of 'The Daily Show'."
- FHM
"Lively reporting from a gently humorous narrator."
- Chris Ayres, The Times
"Touching, often blackly comic reportage."
- GQ
"Brilliantly observed, articulate, often funny and immensely readable."
- The List
"Snappy, self-deprecating and sometimes outright hilarious."
- The Age
"Indelibly humorous and heartfelt."
- Sydney Sunday Telegraph
"An instructive ricochet between cities and continents and war zones."
- Time Out
"He brings to his material the mixture of rage and earthy irony that is the mark of a great satirist
. . . rewarding, thought-provoking and ludicrously funny."
- PopMatters
"Mueller's book is an excellent example of why today's brave, lucid hacks are forced to admit fear and confusion."
- South China Morning Post
"His reporting is sharp, his experiences terrifying and funny."
- Melbourne Herald-Sun
"If you enjoy your international affairs and politics with a good dose of cynicism and black humour, then this book is one to read."
- Brisbane Courier-Mail
"Often laugh-out-loud funny, the writing is utterly engaging."
- Launceston Sunday Examiner
"Mueller's irreverent reportage from abroad is fundamentally a clever cover for the author's ruminations on race, religion, revolution, rock'n'roll and other important issues since September 11, 2001."
- The West Australian
"As hilarious and sardonic a host as this ridiculous world of ours demands."
- Shortlist
"Mueller busies himself with finding the odd, the surreal and the laughable as much as the shocking and upsetting."
- New Zealand Herald
"A real eye for surreal moments of black humour. . . Mueller's work here digs much deeper than the standard newspaper travel essay."
- Sydney Sun-Herald
"His best story, about his brief, bizarre jailing in Cameroon, reads like a 21st century 'Goon Show' script."
- Good Reading
"A rollicking ride through some of the world's scariest scenarios."
- Kalgoorlie Miner
"A strikingly funny book about some seriously unfunny places."
- Perth Sunday Times
"Not bad for a guy from Wagga Wagga."
- The Wagga Wagga Advertiser
 "Andrew Mueller's piece about my band's tour with The Hold Steady is my favourite thing ever written about us. The fact that he is a war correspondent (though he claims otherwise) and music journalist and
approaches both with a similar slant makes him one of the most interesting
writers out there to me."
- Patterson Hood, Drive-By Truckers
"The most important critical anthology on popular music from a single author in a long time, its humour and insight equal with collections by Nick Tosches or Robert Palmer."
- KEXP Seattle
"Take one part P.J. O'Rourke, a healthy dose of Lester Bangs and a dash of Hunter S. Thompson, and you've got Andrew Mueller."
- Bookgasm
"Sharply observed and wittily constructed."
- Honolulu Star-Advertiser
"New edition of the rock classic."
- NY Press
"Mueller's humour makes for some enlightening reading."
- Biloxi-Gulfport Sun-Herald
"Sharp, witty and sarcastic."
- Chicago Tribune
 "Really rather good, in a barnstorming, country-punk sort of way. . . a highly capable ensemble."
- The Quietus
"A more than capable debut - allusive country-tough songs."
- Uncut
"The Blazing Zoos are undoubtedly fun, but they also have depth. . .
everything from Mueller's extensive use of brackets to the band's loving
recreation of classic country riffs bespeaks sincerity."
- Americana UK
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BEYOND BOUNDARIES
Cricket and civilisation
Royston CC yearbook, summer 2008
IN the first week of 2005, I was visiting the Gaza Strip. That statement is, it occurs, very probably the least congruent opening sentence of an essay ever published in the yearbook of a Hertfordshire village cricket club, but I have my reasons – reasons beyond, that is, crassly alerting the reader to the August publication of “I Wouldn’t Start From Here”, my chronicle of meandering through some of the 21st century’s more grotesque geopolitical foolishnesses, the imminent availability of which I am informed I am allowed mention once (Portobello books, only £8.99, order now to avoid disappointment). Anyway, one afternoon, my local translator had taken me to the Jabaliya refugee camp in the north of the Strip. Jabaliya is regarded as a rough neighbourhood even by other Gazans. It’s crowded, filthy and dangerous, a frequent launchpad for Hamas and Islamic Jihad rockets over the border barricades into Israel – and, just as often, a target for the Israel Defence Force’s rarely tactful retribution.
All that said, everyone I met was as heartbreakingly hospitable as people in put-upon dumps usually are, and I experienced no difficulties until my translator and I were walking out of Jabaliya up to the road leading back to Gaza City, where we intended to hail a taxi. A bunch of bored local urchins started pestering us, mockingly intoning annoying questions in the little English they knew, making feints for my shoulder bag, and generally winding up the foreigner. My translator shooed them away, and by the time we reached the road and stopped a cab, they seemed to have lost interest. But as I opened the taxi door, I perceived a dull clonk from a point about an inch behind my right ear, followed by a dazzling, eye-crossing pain. The vigorously flung, fist-sized rock which had caused it bounced onto the road as my translator bundled me into the vehicle like a Secret Service agent protecting a president.
She was mortified, tearfully begging me not to presume – or, worse, write – that the young ruffians were in any way typical of the Palestinian people. I reassured her on that point, but as I rubbed the livid lump gestating on my head, a question occurred. My assailant – who I could see out of the rear window, enjoying the congratulatory hugs of his friends – couldn’t have been more than 12 years old. The little bastard had collected me flush on the bonce from easily 40 yards. With an arm like that, he could have run out Dean Jones from Third Man. Had anybody, I asked my translator, ever tried teaching the Palestinians to play cricket?
“Cricket?” she replied, puzzled.
Cricket, I repeated. It’s a game that goes on interminably, baffles onlookers, and nobody wins. She smiled at the somewhat heavy-handed allusion to the Holy Land’s infuriating history, which was all I’d hoped for, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought I was onto something. While all sports are to some extent a metaphor for everything else, none have as solid or as complex an ethical core as cricket – there are reasons why we don’t react to chicanery in non-sporting realms by sniffing “Well, that’s not football/hockey/lacrosse/badminton/the 4 x 100 metre relay,” and reasons why ungentlemanly conduct still seems more scandalous on a cricket field than on any other arena. A lifetime of watching and playing cricket has not made me a competent cricketer, as my teammates in Royston’s Second XI will wearily attest, but if I’m a competent human being, then I’m certain that cricket has been partly responsible. Obviously, the application of this theory to societies rather than individuals invites a couple of obvious rebuttals – but imagine what Pakistan would be like if the Pakistanis didn’t play cricket (in fact, to return to the subject of failing to impress my belief in the morally redeeming potency of cricket to women, I suggested to Benazir Bhutto, a few months before she died, that a possible solution to her homeland’s travails was the reunification of the sub-continent – an idea she could sell, I enthused, by inviting the people of Pakistan and India to imagine the resulting cricket team. I suppose I’ll never know, now, whether she was subsequently laughing with me or at me.)
The truly great and enduringly ennobling thing about cricket is that, uniquely among sports, you don’t have to be actually any good at the game to excel in it in some regard. If you walk when you know you’re out, refuse to claim catches you know haven’t carried, and clap when an opposing batsman makes a century, then you’ve acquitted yourself honourably, and enlarged, in some small way, the space in which reason and fellowship can flourish. In the summer of 2006, I took a break from watching the apocalyptic television coverage of Israel’s ill-advised assault on Hizbollah – a group of people of whom I have some experience, and whose ranks I’m sure would contain the most formidable bearded tactician since Mike Brearley – and went to Lord’s to see the fourth day of the first Test between England and Pakistan. I took my seat just in time to see Mohammad Yousuf complete a characteristically graceful double century. He raised his bat to the crowd, then descended to his knees to face Mecca and thank his chosen god, and a stadium full of fans of his opposition on the field – and, by some estimations, representatives of his faith’s adversaries off it – stood, unprompted, and applauded, sincerely, his splendid accomplishment. As a single-image definition of civilisation, I’ve seen little to beat it. If only it would catch on.
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