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A stranger in your own city : travels in the Middle East's long war / Ghaith Abdul-Ahad.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2023Edition: First American editionDescription: ix, 409 pages : illustrations, map ; 25 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 9780593536889
  • 0593536886
Subject(s): Genre/Form:
Contents:
My First War -- Mother Of All Battles -- The Years Of The Sanctions -- Baghdad And The Red Room -- Hawassim, The Decisive Battle -- The Statue -- Bakunin In Baghdad -- The Viceroy -- Of Exiles And Militias -- The Rebellion -- Karbala -- A Street In Baghdad -- Falluja -- The Collaterals -- The Shrink -- Hameed -- Saddam Trial -- A Civil War is Born -- The Spy -- The Wedding -- The Baghdad Morgue -- Migration, Part 1 -- The Defeat Of Hameed And Other Sunnis -- The School Teacher -- The Sadda -- Zaid -- The New Leader -- The State of Corruption -- Zaid And Maliki -- The Sunni Spring. Syria -- Enter The Jihadis -- The Sunni Spring, Iraqi Version -- The Jihadi begin Building A State -- We Are Coming O' Baghdad And Other Delusions -- The Collapse of The Brave New Army -- Fall Of Mosul -- The Shia Mobilise To War -- Diala Frontlines -- The State -- The People Resisting -- Migration Part 2 -- The Colonel -- Ali's War, Part I -- Ali's War, Part II -- Life And Tragedy Returns To Mosul.
Summary: "An award-winning journalist's powerful portrait of his native Baghdad, the people of Iraq, and twenty years of war"-- Provided by publisher.
Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Call number Materials specified Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Adult Book Adult Book Main Library NonFiction 956.7044 A136 Available 33111010977946
Adult Book Adult Book Northport Library NonFiction 956.7044 A136 Available 33111009467172
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR * An award-winning journalist's powerful portrait of his native Baghdad, the people of Iraq, and twenty years of war.

"An essential insider account of the unravelling of Iraq...Driven by his intimate knowledge and deep personal stakes, Abdul-Ahad...offers an overdue reckoning with a broken history."--Declan Walsh, author of The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State

"A vital archive of a time and place in history...Impossible to put down."--Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise

The history of reportage has often depended on outsiders -- Ryszard Kapuściński witnessing the fall of the shah in Iran, Frances FitzGerald observing the aftermath of the American war in Vietnam. What would happen if a native son was so estranged from his city by war that he could, in essence, view it as an outsider? What kind of portrait of a war-wracked place and people might he present?

A Stranger in Your Own City is award-winning writer Ghaith Abdul-Ahad's vivid, shattering response. This is not a book about Iraq's history or an inventory of the many Middle Eastern wars that have consumed the nation over the past several decades. This is the tale of a people who once lived under the rule of a megalomaniacal leader who shaped the state in his own image; a people who watched a foreign army invade, topple that leader, demolish the state, and then invent a new country; who experienced the horror of having their home fragmented into a hundred different cities.

When the "Shock and Awe" campaign began in March 2003, Abdul-Ahad was an architect. Within months he would become a translator, then a fixer, then a reporter for The Guardian and elsewhere, chronicling the unbuilding of his centuries-old cosmopolitan city. Beginning at that moment and spanning twenty years, Abdul-Ahad's book decenters the West and in its place focuses on everyday people, soldiers, mercenaries, citizens blown sideways through life by the war, and the proliferation of sectarian battles that continue to this day. Here is their Iraq, seen from the inside: the human cost of violence, the shifting allegiances, the generational change.

A Stranger in Your Own City is a rare work of beauty and tragedy whose power and relevance lie in its attempt to return the land to the people to whom it belongs.

This is a Borzoi Book.

My First War -- Mother Of All Battles -- The Years Of The Sanctions -- Baghdad And The Red Room -- Hawassim, The Decisive Battle -- The Statue -- Bakunin In Baghdad -- The Viceroy -- Of Exiles And Militias -- The Rebellion -- Karbala -- A Street In Baghdad -- Falluja -- The Collaterals -- The Shrink -- Hameed -- Saddam Trial -- A Civil War is Born -- The Spy -- The Wedding -- The Baghdad Morgue -- Migration, Part 1 -- The Defeat Of Hameed And Other Sunnis -- The School Teacher -- The Sadda -- Zaid -- The New Leader -- The State of Corruption -- Zaid And Maliki -- The Sunni Spring. Syria -- Enter The Jihadis -- The Sunni Spring, Iraqi Version -- The Jihadi begin Building A State -- We Are Coming O' Baghdad And Other Delusions -- The Collapse of The Brave New Army -- Fall Of Mosul -- The Shia Mobilise To War -- Diala Frontlines -- The State -- The People Resisting -- Migration Part 2 -- The Colonel -- Ali's War, Part I -- Ali's War, Part II -- Life And Tragedy Returns To Mosul.

"An award-winning journalist's powerful portrait of his native Baghdad, the people of Iraq, and twenty years of war"-- Provided by publisher.

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