2008 Woodie Awards
Middle Eastern books to match your Middle Western education
By: Alex Park, News Editor
Issue date: 11/22/07 Section: Magazine Fall 2007
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Got a budding interest in the Middle East or current affairs but not enough yet to declare your MESIC concentration? Looking to read something over Thanksgiving break that's informative and relevant, while still managing to be actually readable? Then here are two accessible and thought-provoking works of non-fiction to stir the global citizen in you.
The first of these books, Fiasco: the American Military Adventure in Iraq, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Thomas E. Ricks, is widely accepted as the best book so far on the buildup and eventual catastrophe of the Iraq War-at least before analysis thereof falls out of the realm of journalism and into academia. At 451 pages and 438 notes (Ricks said he only made notations when the source was "particularly significant or deserving of notice"), this is a thick book, chop full of facts, figures and anecdotes. Needless to say, it's also a very thorough account.
Ricks interviewed several hundred people-from enlisted men in Baghdad and elsewhere to top civilian and military leadership inside the Beltway-and combed through thousands of pages of government documents, some of which were only recently declassified. The resulting epic is a towering achievement of journalistic research and reporting. If you haven't been religiously committed to newspaper coverage of the Iraq War since its inception but want to be in the know anyway, this is perhaps the best place to start.
Nonetheless, without a formal introduction and no real thesis to speak of, the book does come off like an overloaded daily newspaper article at times. The content is often very dry; the facts are typically presented just as themselves without any literary embellishment. While it's incredibly informative, Fiasco rarely captures the novelistic clarity and historical grasp of, say, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. But it doesn't intend to, either. As the author puts it, the book is "not an academic study written at long remove from its subject, but an attempt to write narrative history on the heels of the events it covers."
The first of these books, Fiasco: the American Military Adventure in Iraq, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Thomas E. Ricks, is widely accepted as the best book so far on the buildup and eventual catastrophe of the Iraq War-at least before analysis thereof falls out of the realm of journalism and into academia. At 451 pages and 438 notes (Ricks said he only made notations when the source was "particularly significant or deserving of notice"), this is a thick book, chop full of facts, figures and anecdotes. Needless to say, it's also a very thorough account.
Ricks interviewed several hundred people-from enlisted men in Baghdad and elsewhere to top civilian and military leadership inside the Beltway-and combed through thousands of pages of government documents, some of which were only recently declassified. The resulting epic is a towering achievement of journalistic research and reporting. If you haven't been religiously committed to newspaper coverage of the Iraq War since its inception but want to be in the know anyway, this is perhaps the best place to start.
Nonetheless, without a formal introduction and no real thesis to speak of, the book does come off like an overloaded daily newspaper article at times. The content is often very dry; the facts are typically presented just as themselves without any literary embellishment. While it's incredibly informative, Fiasco rarely captures the novelistic clarity and historical grasp of, say, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. But it doesn't intend to, either. As the author puts it, the book is "not an academic study written at long remove from its subject, but an attempt to write narrative history on the heels of the events it covers."
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