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Big Boy Rules: America's Mercenaries Fighting In Iraq (2008)

by Steve Fainaru(Favorite Author)

3.78 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0306817438 (ISBN13: 9780306817434)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Da Capo Press

review 1: Part memoir and investigative journalism, Fainaru provides an insight, often infuriating, into mercenary activities in Iraq. It is hard to understand how Bush and his cohorts bamboozled the American public, while opeing the doors to rampant profiteering. How many Americans (and others) died? We just don't know. No one seemed to care about it. Grab the money and run, and just pray an rpg didn't nail you. And if anyone doesn't understand a little of why average Iraqis have no love for Americans, just ride along with Fainaru. Overall, a good and interesting book, but much more is going to have to be done to peel off the truth about what happened over there.
review 2: Now that several members of Blackwater were indicted last week for the fatal shootings of Iraqis ... morein a popular Baghdad square, I highly recommend, for the broader context of understanding U.S. mercenaries -- because that's what they are, hired high-paying guns -- to read Big Boy Rules. This isn't some wonky dissection of the private security contractor industry, nor is it a 200-page polemic against their increasing presence in warfare. Big Boy Rules reads like an engrossing novel. Fainaru happened to pick out a young college student-turned-mercenary to follow around in Iraq and it turned out this main character became the center of an international news crisis -- an ambush, and later, something much worse. The other intriguing aspect of the book is Fainaru's use of first-person: He weaves in passages about his own visits home, to see his brother, a reporter who broke the Barry Bonds case deal with a criminal indictment for refusing to reveal his sources; and their father, dying of cancer. I rarely read books in one sitting, but I spent several hours on a Sunday paging quickly through this one. Fainaru is a reporter at The Washington Post and this book is based off a series of stories he wrote for the newspaper that won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. less

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