Di Giovanni, Janine. The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria. Liveright, 2016.
Di Giovanni works at Newsweek, regularly writes for a bunch of other big news sources--The New York Times, Granta, The Guardian, etc.--and has published multiple books based on her experiences as a war correspondent in different countries. If you'd like to see and hear her, check out her TedTalk, "What I Say in the War." You can also link to various articles and other video/audio on her web site.
As for writing, Di Giovanni's style is clear and she's easy to read: I covered a ridiculous number of pages in a short period of time, almost finishing The Morning They Came for Us in one night. Admittedly, part of that was also the content. It's hard to stop reading when you're in the middle of someone's story of having survived torture or battle, or when you're waiting for the wealthy Syrians the writer meets to maybe, possibly get to a point where they can acknowledge that life is different for the poor than it is for them (and that there might just be solid reasons for some people not to support Assad).
Based on what I understand, the war in Syria is among three basic groups (some of which then break down further): the president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, whose family has been in power for decades, and his supporters (including Russia and Hezbollah); opposition groups who originally were involved in the Arab Spring, who want more freedom and equity and an end to government corruption; and intensely fundamentalist Islamic groups, including Salafi jihadists and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, or what we tend to call ISIS).
At first, Di Giovanni travels (on a legally-obtained visa) and interviews people as she pleases, as far as I could tell. She has friends and contacts in Syria, and she uses them to get into various areas and meet more folks. She talks to people in the opposition who have been kidnapped, held, and tortured by Assad's men. She also talks to people who don't believe that the government could possibly be doing any such things, though it's pretty clear that she thinks they're deluding themselves.
While Di Giovanni doesn't focus on herself, she also doesn't try to entirely remove herself from the story, either (which is good, because that would be impossible). She talks about her reactions to the situations she sees and hears about, and she sometimes quite directly inserts her opinion--though usually about things that pretty much anyone could identify with. It's unlikely to alienate the reader when you, say, talk about how war always means death for soldiers, and each soldier is somebody's child.
She also does a good job making herself appear...oh, what's the word for this? She makes sure to let the reader know that she "asks the tough questions," so to speak. When she's talking to a wealthy Syrian family, she points out their wealth and how it might affect their position, even though this irritates them. When she's traveling with the Syrian Army, she's upfront about not buying her handler's denial of the regime's vicious behavior toward the opposition. Making these things clear is a way of showing the reader that she's trustworthy--or as I'd say in class, she's making a solid ethos argument.
Oh, one of the more mind-boggling little details Di Giovanni mentions is that Assad's wife, Asma, was featured in Vogue in March of 2011--"just before the government ordered security forces to fire on unarmed protesters" (134). The feature focused on how safe and secular Syria supposedly was, and how awesome and chic the Assads supposedly are. If you want to check that out, well, you can't. It's no longer at Vogue, which has deleted the feature. You can, however, read about it over at The Atlantic.
If you want to get a sense of the lives of the people living in Syria during this war--Sunnis, Shia, Christians, Jews; women and men; civilians and soldiers; wealthy and poor and in-between--this is the book you want. Di Giovanni does a great job of roving and collecting the stories and opinions of all different people from all different backgrounds, which I think gives you a very different kind of window onto Syria and Syrians than the political analysis which--though of course important-isn't the whole story, and is often all we get.
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