'The Challenge': a personal side

Jonathan Mahler calls retired Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, left, a "gift from the magazine gods" in a recent piece for the Huffington Post. He was just the kind of frank, colorful figure that Mahler needed to anchor his long nonfiction narrative, "The Challenge," about the back-and-forth courtroom odyssey of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's former driver, which Art Winslow reviewed for us in this Sunday's Times books coverage.

Mahler's piece is personal, a more intimate record of his feelings that, of necessity, had to be avoided to present his objective chronicle of Hamdan's legal battles. Here, for instance, is a paragraph one would never find in "The Challenge":

I was, I'm embarrassed to say in hindsight, a little surprised. Like the government, which had expected Swift to persuade his client to plead guilty to whatever charges were ultimately brought against him, it had never occurred to me that a member of our own military — whose headquarters had, after all, been one of the targets of the 9/11 attacks — would be inclined to put up much of a fight on behalf of an accused terrorist.

Mahler's brief piece is a reminder, in its way, of the efforts nonfiction writers make to keep their own views in check — and a tribute to his own success.

— Nick Owchar

Photo credit: Maura Axelrod, AFP/Getty Images