I Read

Day-Late/Dollar-Short Book Review Dept.:

I'm creeping ever-closer to the end of the George Packer book. Brian Last Stop gave it to me for my birthday in January, and I started reading it that week. I am slow, so slow. But tenacious and willing. I’ve read as much as I could absorb every day, highlighting passages with my silly yellow pen.

What a great book, each chapter better than the one before it. And Packer is such a responsible journalist – he seems not to care about neo-con or liberal perspectives, but just lays it all out. He’s the one telling the human stories of a war that is more often reported in grandiose, insincere language. What the fuck does “liberation,” “internationalization,” and “preemption” mean to the people who are living and fighting and trying to survive down in the sand? But it figures that media would report on the war in such large, abstract terms – because that’s how the war was sold to us. And even as it continues, it seems to be (in Washington) a battle of rhetoric, not bodies. (Packer: “From the pre-war period through the invasion into the occupation and insurgency, an ascendant, triumphalist right and a weakened, querulous left took more interest and pleasure in the other’s defeats than in the condition of Iraq or Iraqis. In this country, Iraq was almost always about winning the argument.”)

Packer got to Iraq in the summer of 2003 and spent quite a lot of time inside and outside of the Green Zone, meeting with soldiers, bureaucrats, and Iraqi civilians. He learned the real deal, and has amazing stories to tell. There are three chapters in the heart of this book (“Insurgencies,” “Civil War?” and “Memorial Day”) that are worth the price of admission for me. Just great, great war-zone writing.

(The prologue and other sections of Assassins' Gate were printed by the New Yorker two-and-a-half years ago.)

Next

See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism by Robert Baer
Passion Is A Fashion: The Real Story of the Clash by Pat Gilbert

[posted with ecto]

On iTunes right now: In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida from the album Less Than Zero by Slayer

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