War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq

Author - Richard Engel ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Hardcover Book item from Simon & Schuster was reviewed on 13-Sep-2008.

Search ISBN:1416563040 offer from Abebooks or used books from Alibris. War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq Reference Book. Classifications : General Middle East History Subjects Books Iraq War Military History Subjects Books General Politics Nonfiction Subjects Books Hardcover Binding (binding) Refinements Books Printed Books Format (featu . Click the following link to view the cover of War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq.

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1) Hardcover Book War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq by Simon & Schuster. A learning experience, on the ground in Iraq. My one and only beef is that there are no maps and no pictures.

Engels, on page 327, himself admits to having a thing for maps. "When ever I want to explain the situation in Iraq, I feel compelled to draw maps." "I am also convince maps are essential to understanding the war in Iraq, which has always been more about geography, religion, and power than democracy. If you know where the Shiites, Sunnis, and the Kurds live, it´s easy to understand their struggles for dominance. If you see on paper how Iran is wedged between U.S. bases in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Persian Gulf, it helps explain why Tehran´s foreign policy seems so aggressive. From where Iran sits, it looks like the country is being surrounded, which it is."

With this book and others I´m slowly getting an idea of what´s going on over there.

other books include;
Nasr, Vali - The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future
Stewart, Rory - The Prince of the Marshes
Bostom, Andrew G. - The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non- Muslims
Heikal, Mohamed - Iran: The Untold Story
Thesiger, Wilfred - The Last Nomad
Arnove, Anthony - Iraq: the logic of withdrawal
Galbraith. Peter W. - The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End

Indirectly
Pious, Richard M. - Why Presidents Fail: White House Decision Making from Eisenhower to Bush II
Ansary, Tamin Mir - West of Kabul, East of New York:
Horwitz, Tony -- Baghdad without a map, and other misadventures in Arabia. fun
Yahia, Mona - When the Grey beetles took over Baghdad: Fiction, but give you some what of an idea of being jewish in Bagdad ´60-70
We´re All Men Here by John Flanagan Fiction, but author taught for a decade in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and Iraq)
¤

2) Hardcover Book War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq by Simon & Schuster. This book has graphic violence and can be hard to take but really gets into the war. At times I found myself thinking that this just can´t possibly be true but then I thought, no one could possibly make this up. There are a lot of scary, crazy, violent people running around Iraq. And just when you think it can´t possibly get any worse, it does. The author has great insights into what is going on there and he is a sympathetic character. The way he ended the book, I get the impression he thinks the current reduction in violence is just a temporary truce while all side eliminate al Queda. Then the Shiite/Sunni civil war will start up again, with the US on the side of the Shiites.¤

3) Hardcover Book War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq by Simon & Schuster. Richard Engel makes the war in Iraq crystal clear from a number of perspectives that help the reader to understand why the war has taken the course it has over these past five years.

His commentary on the differences between the religious sects and their politics as well as their response to the regime change in Iraq and the power vacuum it created along with the subsequent attempts by all parties to fill it is most enlightening.

Want to know why the Iraq war has gone the way that it did, why it is changing, and what may lie in the future? Read this book!¤

4) Hardcover Book War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq by Simon & Schuster. i thoroughly enjoyed reading War Journal. Some of the chapters are really gruesome, but this is the reality of not only the war, but of human nature. One feels the emotions with Richard Engel as the war progress. I congratulate him for being such a brave soul and enduring all that he has been through. I highly recommend this book as an account of what really is happening in Iraq and not of the bias one hears in the media.¤

5) Hardcover Book War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq by Simon & Schuster. The personal details made this book much more interesting than just a blow-by-blow about the players and their politics. My only suggestions: 1) a map at the beginning of the book (even the author said that to explain all of this, a map was necessary) and 2) a glossary at the beginning of the book to explain some of the concepts in more detail.¤

6) Hardcover Book War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq by Simon & Schuster. In the most dramatic and intimate account of battle reporting since Michael Herr´s classic Dispatches, NBC News´s award-winning Middle East Bureau Chief, Richard Engel, offers an unvarnished and often emotional account of five years in Iraq.

Engel is the longest serving broadcaster in Iraq and the only American television reporter to cover the country continuously before, during, and after the 2003 U.S. invasion. Fluent in Arabic, he has had unrivaled access to U.S. military commanders, Sunni insurgents, Shiite militias, Iraqi families, and even President George W. Bush, who called him to the White House for a private briefing. He has witnessed nearly every major milestone in this long war.

War Journal describes what it was like to go into the hole where U.S. Special Operations Forces captured Saddam Hussein. Engel was there as the insurgency began and watched the spread of Iranian influence over Shiite religious cities and the Iraqi government. He watched as Iraqis voted in their first election. He was in the courtroom when Saddam was sentenced to death and interviewed General David Petraeus about the surge.

In vivid, sometimes painful detail, Engel tracks the successes and setbacks of the war. He describes searching, with U.S troops, for a missing soldier in the dangerous Sunni city of Ramadi; surviving kidnapping attempts, IED attacks, hotel bombings, and ambushes; and even the smell of cakes in a bakery attacked by sectarian gangs and strewn with bodies of the executed.

War Journal describes a sectarian war that American leaders were late to understand and struggled to contain. It is an account of the author´s experiences, insights, bittersweet reflections, and moments from his private video diary -- itself the subject of a highly acclaimed documentary on MSNBC.

War Journal is the story of the transformation of a young journalist who moved to the Middle East with $2,000 and a belief that the region would be "the story" of his generation into a seasoned reporter who has at times believed that he would die covering the war. It is about American soldiers, ordinary Iraqis, and especially a few brave individuals on his team who continually risked their lives to make his own daring reporting possible.¤

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 11-Oct-2008, 14165630409781416563044, 870-720-5X0-771-401-631-X8B-6SB-8

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