Download or read book Because of Baghdad written by Bart Newman and published by Xulon Press. This book was released on 2008-05 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Facing the possibility that he would not come back from the war in Iraq, Captain Bart Newman decided to write a journal for his daughter, telling her all the things he might not get to tell her in person. He wrote of everything from how to manage money, to how to build a relationship with God. When he returned home he decided to make the journal a book so that others could share his insights.

Download or read book Baghdad Burning written by Riverbend and published by The Feminist Press at CUNY. This book was released on 2005-04-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the fall of Bagdad, women’s voices have been largely erased, but four months after Saddam Hussein’s statue fell, a 24 year-old woman from Baghdad began blogging. In 2003, a twenty-four-year-old woman from Baghdad began blogging about life in the city under the pseudonym Riverbend. Her passion, honesty, and wry idiomatic English made her work a vital contribution to our understanding of post-war Iraq—and won her a large following. Baghdad Burning is a quotidian chronicle of Riverbend’s life with her family between April 2003 and September of 2004. She describes rolling blackouts, intermittent water access, daily explosions, gas shortages and travel restrictions. She also expresses a strong stance against the interim government, the Bush administration, and Islamic fundamentalists like Al Sadr and his followers. Her book “offers quick takes on events as they occur, from a perspective too often overlooked, ignored or suppressed” (Publishers Weekly). “Riverbend is bright and opinionated, true, but like all voices of dissent worth remembering, she provides an urgent reminder that, whichever governments we struggle under, we are all the same.” —Booklist “Feisty and learned: first-rate reading for any American who suspects that Fox News may not be telling the whole story.” —Kirkus

Download or read book Escape from Baghdad written by James Ashcroft and published by Random House. This book was released on 2009-11-24 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gun-for-hire James 'Ash' Ashcroft thought he'd left Iraq behind. Last time he only got out alive thanks to the bravery of his interpreter and friend Sammy. But now a call for help means Ash must once again face the chaos of war-torn Baghdad - and this time there's no pay cheque. Abandoned by the occupying Coalition Forces, Sammy and his family face certain death at the hands of the Shia-dominated Iraqi Police and the death squads that roam the streets unless Ash and his team can get in and get them to safety over the border. This is the action-packed story of their audacious escape from Baghdad. It is a gripping account of the chaos of war, where the only thing that can be relied upon is the bond between former brothers-in-arms.

Download or read book The Fall of Baghdad written by Jon Lee Anderson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2004-09-23 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the months leading up to the American invasion of Iraq, this New Yorker correspondent “embedded’ himself among the people of Baghdad and, along with a small number of other Western reporters, rode out the entire invasion and much of the subsequent occupation from inside the city. Jon Lee Anderson’s dispatches from Baghdad were immediately and widely recognized as the most important writing anyone was doing on the war anywhere, for any publication. In recognition of its significance, The New Yorker routinely held the magazine open an extra day and set up a special production team to deal with the pieces; around the office, comparisons to John Hersey’s fabled article “Hiroshima” were flying. The Fall of Baghdad is not a collection of New Yorker pieces, though; it is an original and organically cohesive narrative work that tells the story of what the people of Baghdad have endured at the hands of Saddam Hussein, during the war and during its aftermath. This is not a pro- or anti-war book; the point is to bear witness to what the people in this city have endured, to put a human face on a calamity of epic dimensions. The focus alternates among a small cast of characters, a group of disparate Iraqis who allow Anderson to bring to life different facets of the story he wants to tell; and he fills in the canvas around his figures with rich background that makes their significance sing, and helps bind the book together as the definitive reckoning with one of the most fateful stories of our time.

Download or read book The Book of Collateral Damage written by Sinan Antoon and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-28 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sinan Antoon returns to the Iraq war in a poetic and provocative tribute to reclaiming memory Widely-celebrated author Sinan Antoon’s fourth and most sophisticated novel follows Nameer, a young Iraqi scholar earning his doctorate at Harvard, who is hired by filmmakers to help document the devastation of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. During the excursion, Nameer ventures to al-Mutanabbi street in Baghdad, famed for its bookshops, and encounters Wadood, an eccentric bookseller who is trying to catalogue everything destroyed by war, from objects, buildings, books and manuscripts, flora and fauna, to humans. Entrusted with the catalogue and obsessed with Wadood’s project, Nameer finds life in New York movingly intertwined with fragments from his homeland’s past and its present—destroyed letters, verses, epigraphs, and anecdotes—in this stylistically ambitious panorama of the wreckage of war and the power of memory.

Download or read book The Sirens of Baghdad written by Yasmina Khadra and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2008-05-06 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The third novel in Yasmina Khadra's bestselling trilogy about Islamic fundamentalism has the most compelling backdrop of any of his novels: Iraq in the wake of the American invasion. A young Iraqi student, unable to attend college because of the war, sees American soldiers leave a trail of humiliation and grief in his small village. Bent on revenge, he flees to the chaotic streets of Baghdad where insurgents soon realize they can make use of his anger. Eventually he is groomed for a secret terrorist mission meant to dwarf the attacks of September 11th, only to find himself struggling with moral qualms. The Sirens of Baghdad is a powerful look at the effects of violence on ordinary people, showing what can turn a decent human being into a weapon, and how the good in human nature can resist. “Compelling. . . . Khadra brings us deep into the hearts and minds of people living in unspeakable mental anguish.” —Los Angeles Times

Download or read book Baghdad written by Justin Marozzi and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2014-05-29 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood, celebrated young travelwriter-historian Justin Marozzi gives us a many-layered history of one of the world's truly great cities - both its spectacular golden ages and its terrible disasters 'Justin Marozzi is the most brilliant of the new generation of travelwriter-historians' - Sunday Telegraph Over thirteen centuries, Baghdad has enjoyed both cultural and commercial pre-eminence, boasting artistic and intellectual sophistication and an economy once the envy of the world. It was here, in the time of the Caliphs, that the Thousand and One Nights were set. Yet it has also been a city of great hardships, beset by epidemics, famines, floods, and numerous foreign invasions which have brought terrible bloodshed. This is the history of its storytellers and its tyrants, of its philosophers and conquerors. Here, in the first new history of Baghdad in nearly 80 years, Justin Marozzi brings to life the whole tumultuous history of what was once the greatest capital on earth. Justin Marozzi is a Councillor of the Royal Geographic Society and a Senior Research Fellow at Buckingham University. He has broadcast for BBC Radio Four, and regularly contributes to a wide range of publications, including the Financial Times, for which he has worked in Iraq, Afghanistan and Darfur. His previous books include the bestselling Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, a Sunday Telegraph Book of the Year (2004), and The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus.

Download or read book Thieves of Baghdad written by Matthew Bogdanos and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2008-12-09 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thieves of Baghdad is a riveting account of Colonel Matthew Bogdanos and his team's extraordinary efforts to recover over 5,000 priceless antiquities stolen from the Iraqi National Museum after the fall of Baghdad. A mixture of police procedural, treasure hunt, war-time thriller, and cold-eyed assessment of the international black market in stolen art, Thieves of Baghdad also explores the soul of a truly remarkable man: a soldier, a father, and a passionate, dedicated scholar.

Download or read book Baghdad Burning II written by Riverbend and published by The Feminist Press at CUNY. This book was released on 2009-05-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Riverbend, the young Iraqi woman whose “articulate, even poetic prose packs an emotional punch,” continues her blog from her hometown of Baghdad (The New York Times). Riverbend, the pseudonymous recipient of a Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Literary Reportage, continues her chronicle of daily life in occupied Baghdad. Drawn from her popular blog, this volume spans from October 2004 through March 2006. In her distinctively wry yet urgent prose Riverbend, now 27, tells of life in a middle-class, secular, mixed Shia-Sunni family. She describes the attacks she sees on TV, raids in her neighborhood, fuel shortages, rolling blackouts, and water shortages, all while offering insightful critiques of the Iraqi draft constitution and American Media. Riverbend reveals how, for the first time in her life, she feels lesser due to her gender. Dispelling reductive, media-driven stereotypes, she explains that most Iraqis are tolerant people, prefer secular to religious government, oppose a civil war, and desperately want the occupation to end.

Download or read book The 8 55 to Baghdad written by Andrew Eames and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2006-05-02 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A winning blend of travelogue and literary biography” by a British journalist who travels the journey Agatha Christie once did from London to Iraq. (Entertainment Weekly) With her marriage to her first husband over, Agatha Christie decided to take a much needed holiday; the Caribbean had been her intended destination, but a conversation at a dinner party with a couple who had just returned from Iraq changed her mind. Five days later she was off on a completely different trajectory. Merging literary biography with travel adventure, and ancient history with contemporary world events, Andrew Eames tells a riveting tale and reveals fascinating and little-known details of this exotic chapter in the life of Agatha Christie. His own trip from London to Baghdad--a journey much more difficult to make in 2002 with the political unrest in the Middle East and the war in Iraq, than it was in 1928--becomes intertwined with Agatha's, and the people he meets could have stepped out of a mystery novel. Fans of Agatha Christie will delight in Eames' description of the places and events that appeared in and influenced her fiction--and armchair travelers will thrill in the exotica of the journey itself. “Agatha Christie fans, as well as connoisseurs of fine travel writing, will relish British journalist Eames's gripping, humorous and eye-opening account of his train and bus trip across Europe and the Middle East on the eve of the second Gulf War.” Publisher’s Weekly Second;Iraq;Gulf;war;Kurds;Armenians;Palestinians;English;travel;writer;writing;1928;bestselling;mystery;author;English;crime;writer;Europe;passenger;train;memoir;literary;biography;adventure;travel;history;autobiography;holiday;Middle;East;Damascus;Ur;Syria;archaeology TRV026090 TRAVEL / Special Interest / Literary BIO007000 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary Figures BIO026000 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs TRV015000 TRAVEL / Middle East / General 9781468306415 Candlemoth Ellory, R.J.

Download or read book The Wolf of Baghdad written by Carol Isaacs and published by Myriad Editions. This book was released on 2020-01-30 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Enthralling and moving. It is magical.'— Claudia Roden In the 1940s a third of Baghdad's population was Jewish. Within a decade nearly all 150,000 had been expelled, killed or had escaped. This graphic memoir of a lost homeland is a wordless narrative by an author homesick for a home she has never visited. Transported by the power of music to her ancestral home in the old Jewish quarter of Baghdad, the author encounters its ghost-like inhabitants who are revealed as long-gone family members. As she explores the city, journeying through their memories and her imagination, she at first sees successful integration, and cultural and social cohesion. Then the mood turns darker with the fading of this ancient community's fortunes. This beautiful wordless narrative is illuminated by the words and portraits of her family, a brief history of Baghdadi Jews and of the making of this work. Says Isaacs: 'The Finns have a word, kaukokaipuu, which means a feeling of homesickness for a place you've never been to. I've been living in two places all my life; the England I was born in, and the lost world of my Iraqi-Jewish family's roots.'

Download or read book Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad written by Bee Rowlatt and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2010-02-04 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A London mum and Iraqi teacher should have nothing in common. Yet now, despite their differences, they're the firmest of friends . . . Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad by Bee Rowlatt and May Witwit is a touching and poignant portrait of an unlikely friendship. Would you brave gun-toting militias for a cut and blow dry? May's a tough-talking, hard-smoking, lecturer in English. She's also an Iraqi from a Sunni-Shi'ite background living in Baghdad, dodging bullets before breakfast, bargaining for high heels in bombed-out bazaars and battling through blockades to reach her class of Jane Austen-studying girls. Bee, on the other hand, is a London mum of three, busy fighting off PTA meetings and chicken pox, dealing with dead cats and generally juggling work and family while squabbling with her globe-trotting husband over the socks he leaves lying around the house. They should have nothing in common. But when a simple email brings them together, they discover a friendship that overcomes all their differences of culture, religion and age. Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad is the story of two women who share laughter and tears, and swap their confidences, dreams and fears. And, between the grenades, the gossip, the jokes and the secrets, they also hatch an ingenious plan to help May escape the bombings of Baghdad . . . Bee Rowlatt is a former show-girl turned BBC World Service journalist. A mother of three and would-be do-gooder, she can find keeping her career going while caring for her three daughters (and husband) pretty tough, even in leafy North London. May Witwit is an Iraqi expert in Chaucer and sender of emails depicting kittens in fancy dress. She is prepared to face every hazard imaginable to make that all-important hairdresser's appointment.

Download or read book Ghost Riders of Baghdad written by Daniel A. Sjursen and published by University Press of New England. This book was released on 2015-09-22 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From October 2006 to December 2007, Daniel A. Sjursen-then a U.S. Army lieutenant-led a light scout platoon across Baghdad. The experiences of Ghost Rider platoon provide a soldier's-eye view of the incredible complexities of warfare, peacekeeping, and counterinsurgency in one of the world's most ancient cities. Sjursen reflects broadly and critically on the prevailing narrative of the surge as savior of America's longest war, on the overall military strategy in Iraq, and on U.S. relations with ordinary Iraqis. At a time when just a handful of U.S. senators and representatives have a family member in combat, Sjursen also writes movingly on questions of America's patterns of national service. Who now serves and why? What connection does America's professional army have to the broader society and culture? What is the price we pay for abandoning the model of the citizen soldier? With the bloody emergence of ISIS in 2014, Iraq and its beleaguered, battle-scarred people are again much in the news. Unlike other books on the U.S. war in Iraq, Ghost Riders of Baghdad is part battlefield chronicle, part critique of American military strategy and policy, and part appreciation of Iraq and its people. At once a military memoir, history, and cultural commentary, Ghost Riders of Bahdad delivers a compelling story and a deep appreciation of both those who serve and the civilians they strive to protect. Sjursen provides a riveting addition to our understanding of modern warfare and its human costs.

Download or read book Frankenstein in Baghdad written by Ahmed Saadawi and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-01-23 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *International Booker Prize finalist* “Brave and ingenious.” —The New York Times “Gripping, darkly humorous . . . profound.” —Phil Klay, bestselling author and National Book Award winner for Redeployment “Extraordinary . . . A devastating but essential read.” —Kevin Powers, bestselling author and National Book Award finalist for The Yellow Birds From the rubble-strewn streets of U.S.-occupied Baghdad, Hadi—a scavenger and an oddball fixture at a local café—collects human body parts and stitches them together to create a corpse. His goal, he claims, is for the government to recognize the parts as people and to give them proper burial. But when the corpse goes missing, a wave of eerie murders sweeps the city, and reports stream in of a horrendous-looking criminal who, though shot, cannot be killed. Hadi soon realizes he’s created a monster, one that needs human flesh to survive—first from the guilty, and then from anyone in its path. A prizewinning novel by “Baghdad’s new literary star” (The New York Times), Frankenstein in Baghdad captures with white-knuckle horror and black humor the surreal reality of contemporary Iraq.

Download or read book Blind Into Baghdad written by James Fallows and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-02-25 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the autumn of 2002, Atlantic Monthly national correspondent James Fallows wrote an article predicting many of the problems America would face if it invaded Iraq. After events confirmed many of his predictions, Fallows went on to write some of the most acclaimed, award-winning journalism on the planning and execution of the war, much of which has been assigned as required reading within the U.S. military. In Blind Into Baghdad, Fallows takes us from the planning of the war through the struggles of reconstruction. With unparalleled access and incisive analysis, he shows us how many of the difficulties were anticipated by experts whom the administration ignored. Fallows examines how the war in Iraq undercut the larger ”war on terror” and why Iraq still had no army two years after the invasion. In a sobering conclusion, he interviews soldiers, spies, and diplomats to imagine how a war in Iran might play out. This is an important and essential book to understand where and how the war went wrong, and what it means for America.

Download or read book Baghdad Noir written by Muhsin al-Ramli and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2018-08-07 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique anthology of Iraqi noir fiction collects fourteen original stories of crime, conspiracy, regret, and revenge in the capital of Iraq. The centuries-old city of Baghdad has known many rulers, many troubles, and many crimes. But while most Iraqis would agree that their life has always been noir, there has not been a literary tradition to capture this aspect of the culture. By commissioning the fourteen stories collected here—most by Iraqi writers, all by authors familiar with Baghdad—editor Samuel Shimon and Akashic Books have created what may be the first anthology of Iraqi crime fiction ever assembled. Here you will read of life in Baghdad both during and after the Saddam Hussein era, with stories of fear in the shadow of a ruthless dictator; kidnappings in the time of U.S. occupation; detectives who investigate political conspiracies; and tales of revenge, assassination, mental illness, and family struggle in the war-torn City of Peace. Baghdad Noir includes brand-new stories by Sinan Antoon, Ali Bader, Mohammed Alwan Jabr, Nassif Falak, Dheya al-Khalidi, Hussain al-Mozany, Layla Qasrany, Hayet Raies, Muhsin al-Ramli, Ahmed Saadawi, Hadia Said, Salima Salih, Salar Abdoh, and Roy Scranton.

Download or read book Black Butterflies Over Baghdad written by David Allen Sullivan and published by . This book was released on 2021-10 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chosen by Tim Seibles for The Hilary Tham Capital Collection. Brian Turner says Sullivan "listens across cultures and across languages in order to undo the erasures of time and power," calling this "a book of compassion and deep humanity." Poems spring from inspirations as various as paintings by Iraqi painters, the voices of Iraqi poets, co-translation projects with poets living there or in exile, and daily life in Iraq itself. Co-translations comprise one section of the collection and give a priceless cross-section of Iraqi poets today. Says Seibles: "David Allen Sullivan gives us an intimate tour of war-torn Iraq, an intricate look at the minds of people for whom military violence had become a defining part of daily life. Because these figures speak with such authority and desperation, reading this collection disrupts and deepens the way we, who have not lived with war, perceive its terrible damage. The poems are at times poignantly lyrical and in other moments darkly magical--as if the reader has somehow entered the poet's more than real dreamscape. I don't know if art can save us from self-annihilation, but to echo Muriel Rukeyser slightly: David Allen Sullivan's poetry is the kind of thing that might help us back away from the brink." Lola Haskins adds: "Sullivan's book left me in a state of shock and awe: shocked by the terrible sufferings of the Iraqi people, and awed by the high and heart-breaking grace of the survivors who present them. For me, the most resonant word in the poems is 'blood,' not because it's so often used, but because of its double meanings: the literal--the substance in all our veins that's essential to life, and the figurative--'family,' which is the heart the whole collection wears on its metaphoric sleeve: that we are all, wherever we come from, family." Poetry. Middle Eastern Studies.