BOOKPATHS

Iraq

Exiled poet Nabeel Yasin’s shares his diary of the Iraq election.

12 February:  Today our campaign begins. Baghdad is a forest of coloured posters: all the usual faces use their millions of dollars of overseas support despite constitutional law forbidding any political candidate from accepting overseas donations. Volunteers paste ours up strategically. Many remind people that "The right of the voter is above the right of the MP!" and feature pictures of me or the other candidates. All of them feature the party number that appears on voting slips – 341. We hope this number makes history. We have several hundred posters and 140 big street signs. We cannot afford to waste any. The posters stamp our presence around the city. I hope it is enough. – from “Nabeel Yasin’s Diary of the Iraq Election,” The Guardian

Iraq

Forever War author Dexter Filkins talks to Steve Inskeep on NPR’s Morning Edition.

”There were always two conversations in Iraq, the one the Iraqis were having with Americans and the one they were having among themselves.” – Dexter Filkins, NPR Interview

Baghdad, Iraq

Saad Eskander, “director of Baghdad’s national library,” tells Stuart Jeffries how he “wants to ‘help Iraqis understand their past and built their future’ through education.”

“But what does cultural education even mean? ‘We want to change people's orientation through our books. Otherwise there is no alternative but mosques. I would always say invest in secular education, because religious extremism is a cultural phenomenon - it is not wholly an armed phenomenon. We need to prove to people that there is an alternative.’” – from “Books, Tears and Blood,” by Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian

Baghdad, Iraq

Oliver Poole explains how the people of Baghdad inspired his new book Red Zone: Five Bloody Years in Baghdad.

“For the last few years Baghdad was my home. I lived there as a journalist, covering a period when the certainties of life fragmented as a society unravelled. Some of my friends were abducted, others were murdered and a few were sent mad from the horror of it all. Yet, despite the extremity of what was happening to their country, the majority of the Iraqis I met remained not that different from you and me.” – from “Oliver Poole: What the War Taught Me,” by Oliver Poole, The Independent

Baghdad, Iraq

Patricia Cohen talks with Saad Eskander, the director of Iraq’s National Library and Archive in Baghdad, about his British Library website diary entries detailing “the daily hurdles of keeping Iraq’s central library open, preserving the surviving archives and books and, oh yes, staying alive.”

“Dr. Eskander said that a friend who works at the National Archives in Britain suggested he write a diary for an archivists’ Web site. ‘I was hesitant,’ he wrote in an e-mail exchange yesterday. ‘I feared that people would not believe what I would say about our daily life and the state of total chaos and destruction prevailing in Baghdad.’” -- from “Baghdad Day to Day: Librarian’s Journal”, by Patricia Cohen, New York Times

Iraq

Sgt. Brian Turner talks with Edward Guthmann about his Iraq inspired poetry, now collected in Here, Bullet.

“Keeping a journal was one way he coped. That, and writing a series of poems that describe the dust and the heat, the bombings and the shrapnel, the pointlessness of the conflict and the suicide of Bruce Miller, a 23-year-old private who stuck the barrel of a machine gun down his throat. Those poems are now collected in Here, Bullet (Alice James Books, $14.95), a tough and eloquent volume that won the Northern California Book Award for poetry and a PEN Center USA ‘Best in the West’ Literary Award in Poetry.” – from “The Horror, the Horror of Iraq, in Poetry,” by Edward Guthmann, San Francisco Chronicle

Iraq

Read or listen to Steve Inskeep’s discussion with George Packer, “author of 2005’s highly acclaimed The Assassins’ Gate : America in Iraq,” about the “slew of recently released books [that] examine U.S. policy and military strategy behind the Iraq war.”

“In a sense, it [The Prince of the Marshes : and Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq, by Rory Stewart] leaves you with more despair than the scathing accounts from Washington and Baghdad, because it leaves you thinking: Is nation building possible? Is it a good idea to try? Should we really be bringing new ideas, or should we simply try to work with what's already there, namely tribalism and deep religious faith?” – from “A Shelf Full of Books Chronicle Iraq Policy, Strategy,” Steve Inskeep, Morning Edition, NPR website

Baghdad, Iraq

Read or listen to Anne Garrels’ Morning Edition story about the “Freedom Space” tent, a brief “oasis” for Baghdad poets.

“But for a brief moment, builders erect a temple for writers -- a tent decked out with ceiling fans, plastic flowers and a sound system.” – from Baghdad Poets Find an Oasis from Violence,” by Anne Garrels, NPR - Morning Edition

News of Books & Place

“Three authors,” writes Todd Oppenheimer in the San Francisco Chronicle, “make the case that time and again, the U.S. has made disastrous mistakes in Iraq.”

“Individually, each of these books -- Fiasco (The Penguin Press; 482 pages; $27.95), Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (Knopf; 320 pages; $25.95) and The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End (Simon & Schuster; 260 pages; $26) -- has its shortcomings. But those misses are dwarfed by the weight of persuasive material each author has found, and by the elegance of their presentations.” – from “Arrogance and Ignorance,” by Todd Oppenheimer, The San Francisco Chronicle

Iraq

Emily Gertz interviews Jonathan Trouern-Trend, author of the recently published Birding Babylon.

While stationed at Camp Anaconda -- a huge American installation located about 40 miles north of Baghdad in the Sunni Triangle near the Tigris River -- Trouern-Trend got to know the better birding spots on the base, including a small lagoon and the camp dump. Since he was working in intelligence, the base MPs didn't pay much attention as he peered through his binoculars. He recorded his observations anonymously on the blog Birding Babylon, and the matter-of-fact reports eventually attracted a wide readership. – "Wing Man : How Birding and Blogging Changed One Soldier’s Time in Iraq,” by Emily Gertz, Grist Magazine

And, the blog continues. Visit Birding Babylon.