Tuesday, June 19, 2007
"Post-war" book on Iraq wins prize
Literature, Reconstruction
(The Guardian) - A book chronicling the chaos and cronyism that characterised the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority's government of Iraq swept to victory in the £30,000 Samuel Johnson non-fiction prize last night. Imperial Life in the Emerald City, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, says that more than $1.6bn (£800m) of Iraq's oil revenue was paid to the US vice-president Dick Cheney's old firm Halliburton; that the Baghdad stock exchange was put in the hands of a 24-year-old who had never worked in finance; and that the Iraqi capital's new traffic regulations were based on the laws of the state of Maryland, downloaded from the internet.
These are among hundreds of allegations based on interviews, documents and case studies which led the judges to salute Chandrasekaran's book as "up there with the greatest reportage of the last 50 years" at an awards ceremony in London. The chair of the judges, Lady Helena Kennedy QC, said it was "as fine as Hershey on Hiroshima and Capote's In Cold Blood". She added: "The writing is cool, exact and never overstated and in many places very humorous as the jaw-dropping idiocy of the American action is revealed. Chandrasekaran stands back, detached and collected, from his subject but his reader is left gobsmacked, right in the middle."
The author - a former Washington Post Baghdad bureau chief - sets his narrative mostly inside the Green Zone, the heavily guarded Baghdad sector inside which the US governed Iraq for the first year after Saddam's downfall.
The runner-up for the award - which is never officially revealed - is thought to have been Daughter of the Desert, by Georgina Howell, which also has an Iraqi connection. It is a biography of the archaeologist, spy, Arab linguist, mountaineer and poet Gertrude Bell, who helped king Faisal draw the borders of the fledgling state of Iraq.
The other judges were scientist and broadcaster Jim Al-Khalili; writer and editor Diana Athill; historian and journalist Tristram Hunt; and broadcaster and journalist Mark Lawson. The other books on the shortlist were: Murder in Amsterdam, by Ian Buruma; Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties, by Peter Hennessy; Brainwash, by Dominic Streatfeild; and The Verneys, by Adrian Tinniswood.
These are among hundreds of allegations based on interviews, documents and case studies which led the judges to salute Chandrasekaran's book as "up there with the greatest reportage of the last 50 years" at an awards ceremony in London. The chair of the judges, Lady Helena Kennedy QC, said it was "as fine as Hershey on Hiroshima and Capote's In Cold Blood". She added: "The writing is cool, exact and never overstated and in many places very humorous as the jaw-dropping idiocy of the American action is revealed. Chandrasekaran stands back, detached and collected, from his subject but his reader is left gobsmacked, right in the middle."
The author - a former Washington Post Baghdad bureau chief - sets his narrative mostly inside the Green Zone, the heavily guarded Baghdad sector inside which the US governed Iraq for the first year after Saddam's downfall.
The runner-up for the award - which is never officially revealed - is thought to have been Daughter of the Desert, by Georgina Howell, which also has an Iraqi connection. It is a biography of the archaeologist, spy, Arab linguist, mountaineer and poet Gertrude Bell, who helped king Faisal draw the borders of the fledgling state of Iraq.
The other judges were scientist and broadcaster Jim Al-Khalili; writer and editor Diana Athill; historian and journalist Tristram Hunt; and broadcaster and journalist Mark Lawson. The other books on the shortlist were: Murder in Amsterdam, by Ian Buruma; Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties, by Peter Hennessy; Brainwash, by Dominic Streatfeild; and The Verneys, by Adrian Tinniswood.
COMMENT: I highly recommend this book for anyone who has an interest in Iraq, history and / or politics. It goes a long way in explaining why Iraq is in the situation it is in today and documents in a well researched objective way the timeline from when the invasion ended to the end of the CPA's tenure. COMMENT ENDS.
Labels: CPA, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Samuel Johnson non-fiction prize
