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War Journal: My Five Years In Iraq (2008)

by Richard Engel(Favorite Author)

4.19 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

1416563040 (ISBN13: 9781416563044)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Simon & Schuster, Inc.

review 1: This book peels back the layers of the Iraq conflict. War Journal shows the Bush invasion of Iraq, and the internal events that followed, from an eyewitness perspective. Engel, an NBC News correspondent, lived in the Middle East for many years before going into the country just before the invasion. He experienced the lead-up to the war, the "shock and awe," the insurgency, and the surge. The reader not only gets a vivid, sometimes graphic, view of the war from the inside, but also how Engel deals with it. At times, it really wears on him and it shows in the writing, but even he admits the war has affected him in a number of ways. If you've seen him on TV reporting on events, this book may change your perspective and give insight on the vast amount of knowledge he has... more about the region. This isn't one of those positive "We're bringing democracy to Iraq" types of books, but instead a pragmatic, realistic view of how it is achieved, if it is ever achieved, and the process and costs it has on everyone, American and Iraqi. War Journal is a very good book about not only the conflict, but how a journalist handles that situation.
review 2: I always forget how great war correspondents books generally are. Even so, this one is definitely better than most. Engel does a great job of giving a great outline of the situation on the ground in Iraq from post-invasion until the Sunni uprising and the surge 5 years later. It's pretty brutal, but obviously it's a book about a pretty awful war. All the info is packed together very nicely in a really entertaining and well written narrative. There's no idealogical slant really, no overarching judgments about the war or politics, which makes you trust his account a bit more than most. By the end, I felt fairly bad about myself for letting the war fade into the background, even though it's still raging 6 years after it started. There aren't any solutions in the book, in fact much of his experience shows that just aren't going to be any clean, elegant solutions to the problems in Iraq. As the weird and stupid quote's machine that is Donald Rumsfeld famously said, "war is messy." less

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