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I Lost My Love In Baghdad: A Modern War Story (2008)

by Michael Hastings(Favorite Author)

3.78 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1416560971 (ISBN13: 9781416560975)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Scribner Book Company

review 1: This book just made me angry; angry at Micheal and Andi for dying so young; angry at Bush & Cheney for getting us involved in this unnecessary war: angry about how badly run this was was. I already knew about this book and had always wanted to read it. I remember Michael's tragic death and watched Rachel Maddow & Fareed Zakariah trying to hold it together as they reported it. We have so few real reporters, so losing one so talented and young was just horrific.This was Micheal's first book written at the age of 28. He was trying to build a career as a war correspondent and a life with his fiance, Andi Parhamovich. As the youngest war correspondent, he felt strongly that his job came first which led to problems with Andi who, of course, felt she should come first. Andi naive... morely decides to follow him to Baghdad, thinking that would make them closer. She takes a job with the National Democratic Institute, a Washington based non-profit organization, just a few blocks from the Green Zone where he is stationed. She doesn't really understand that going a few blocks in Baghdad in 2005, is a death wish. She plans a meeting with the Iraqi Islamic Party, the country's largest Sunni party, at their headquarters. It was a setup and she was killed in a horrific fight. The lack of security was such a scandal that the organization was force to move out of Baghdad shortly after her death.This is definitely worth reading, because he is such an amazing writer. Your feel like you can smell, see and hear the fog of war. You feel the frustration of the troops and the translators. I plan to read his other book and wish he and Andi were still around. I miss their voices.
review 2: I learned about this book when Chris Hayes on MSNBC memorialized Michael Hastings the day after a car accident took his life. (Hastings was the journalist who wrote the Rolling Stone article about General Stanley McChrystal and brought down his career.) The book gives an insight into the life of a war journalist, the dangers, the tedium, the havoc it wreaks on a relationship. His assignments in Iraq encouraged his girlfriend to take a job in Baghdad with the National Democratic Institute, a Washington-based organization that provides training and material to political parties and the news media in fragile democracies. I think the war story is more illuminating than the love story, perhaps because I liked the man he was as a journalist versus how he fared as a boyfriend torn between wanting to be with Andi but wanting to take assignments that would further his career. I understand that dilemma between the two and am saddened by the frightening and tragic end to their story. less

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