As a teenager in 1991, I watched a coalition of Western powers bombard Iraq into submission. Twelve years later, “regime change” was the agenda. Iraq descended into sectarianism, civil war, and Islamist insurgency. Western depictions had reduced Iraq to an authoritarian state with a megalomaniac leader and no history of its own. These events and the accompanying vilification of Iraq and its people convinced me to study the country’s history. I try to bring nuance and depth to a story so often told superficially. I think history is about giving life to the voices and perspectives of the past. The result, I hope, is an authentic and unbiased portrayal of Iraqi history.
If you want a quick overview of Iraqi history with easily digestible political science takes on the country’s problems, this is your book. Tripp’s study of Iraq has been read by countless undergraduate students—myself included—grappling with trying to understand the course of events that led the United States to declare war on Iraq twice. The book provides lucid arguments in an easily accessible writing style. As a first introduction to Iraqi history, this book is hard to beat.
To understand Iraq, Charles Tripp's history is the book to read. Since its first appearance in 2000, it has become a classic in the field of Middle East studies, read and admired by students, soldiers, policymakers and journalists. The book is now updated to include the recent American invasion, the fall and capture of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent descent into civil strife. What is clear is that much that has happened since 2003 was foreshadowed in the account found in this book. Tripp's thesis is that the history of Iraq throughout the twentieth-century has made it what it is…
I love inventing inventions and experimenting with experiments–all in aid of blending science and story to inspire innovation and positive change. My career covers six countries, 15+ novels for primary-aged children, and jobs that include science journalism at CERN (home of the Large Hadron Collider), exploding things at Questacon (as part of a science circus), and collecting bins in the back of a ute (as a garbage analyst). I write for children because I believe (and it’s scientifically proven) that our children are the future.
I know and love some hopeless optimists and can recognise myself in Angry Wasp and Friendly Bee in equal measure.
This is a quirky and hilarious book about finding friendship in the most unlikely places. I love the messages of loyalty and glass-half-full living, all in a fun mix of near-miss disasters.
It's a great read for younger readers learning about friendship.
Friendly Bee wants to be friends with every bug he meets, whether they like it or not.
Meet Friendly Bee: he's a bee who puts himself out there, a bee who sees the best in other beings. Sometimes, Friendly Bee’s cheerful attitude gets him into trouble – like almost being squashed by an excessively large shoe; or becoming a delicious meal for the mildly homicidal Enormous Hairy Spider. Luckily, Friendly Bee’s reluctant best friend Angry Wasp is there to save this buzzing buffoon from certain doom – if he really has to.
My maternal great-grandparents were Irish immigrants. My paternal grandfather left Liverpool in the late 19th century to go to Australia. I’d love to know their children’s stories! Some of the families I visited as a social worker (mid-1960s) were immigrants, struggling to make sense of a new language and a new culture. I met a child who had come here alone as an illegal immigrant and had been a house slave until the social services settled her with a foster family. I met author Hanna Jansen and her many adopted children from war-torn countries. Fiction gives us many powerful stories about children forced to flee from their homes because of war, tyranny, hunger, poverty, natural disasters.
13 year old Tara is a Kurd living in Iraq. Overnight her world is turned upside down as her people are under bombardment from the government of Saddam Hussein and she has to flee for her life. It is 1970. Tara and her mother and little sister Hero and brother make a difficult, dangerous overnight journey across the mountains into Iran, but even there their lives are in danger. They have no idea what has happened to Tara’s father and brother, or if they will ever see them again.
I knew little about the Kurds until I read this book. Laird’s sympathetic and well-researched novel took me into the heart of these people who have no homeland, this family, and this teenaged war refugee.
Tara is an ordinary teenager. Although her country, Kurdistan, is caught up in a war, the fighting seems far away. It hasn't really touched her. Until now. The secret police are closing in. Tara and her family must flee to the mountains with only the few things they can carry. It is a hard and dangerous journey - but their struggles have only just begun. Will anywhere feel like home again?
From over three decades of work on development projects in countries of the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Africa, I am convinced that when efforts fail, it is invariably because we lack the cultural understanding of what people want or how we provide it. These books all reinforce my point by either underlining the way culture shapes the way people see the world or by showing how when we neglect culture, we do so at our own peril. Culture can be discovered through multiple entry points with these books offering a good start. Even something as mundane as advice columns in newspapers offer political insights when plumbed for the meanings below the surface.
In 2003 Stewart was appointed deputy governor of Amara and then later Nasiriya, both provinces in the remote southern marsh areas of Iraq. His job was to offer reconstruction resources and bring a semblance of order to their civilian government after coalition forces overthrew Saddam Hussein. What he found was two very different kinds of reactions to his advice by the local population. When he returned to see the results of their community-building efforts much later, he was surprised to find that the most contentious group had made the greatest progress. His narrative reminds us that cultures have sub-groups with variations in the way they respond to various sets of conditions. Accepting assistance passively from an outsider rather than negotiating differences upfront can result in a flawed implementation.
An adventurous diplomat’s “engrossing and often darkly humorous” memoir of working with Iraqis after the fall of Saddam Hussein(Publishers Weekly).
In August 2003, at the age of thirty, Rory Stewart took a taxi from Jordan to Baghdad. A Farsi-speaking British diplomat who had recently completed an epic walk from Turkey to Bangladesh, he was soon appointed deputy governor of Amarah and then Nasiriyah, provinces in the remote, impoverished marsh regions of southern Iraq. He spent the next eleven months negotiating hostage releases, holding elections, and splicing together some semblance of an infrastructure for a population of millions teetering on the…
I started writing about another world when I was eight years old. I was already a reader, but books for kids were full of adventuring boys, with girls mostly sidelined. My world started with a gang of adventuring girls, and as I aged up, it kept getting bigger, and deeper, especially as I studied history. All fiction is a mirror to our contemporary society, and in conversation with other fiction; so is epic fantasy written over a lifetime. Many books later, I still get to adventure, wield magic, and be a hero, through my characters!
Brust has written a long series that is all connected to his cycle about Vlad Taltos.
My favorite is The Phoenix Guards, which evokes, for me, the swashbuckling style and fun of Dumas’ Three Musketeers. Brust took that tongue-in-cheek narrative voice, and the panache of the seventeenth-century Musketeers as envisioned by Dumas, and created this world full of magic and fascinating denizens.
During my decades in the corporate world, I traveled extensively and spent months in England, where I became a devoted Anglophile. I am privileged to have met Queen Elizabeth II and Philip, and to have attended a knighting at Westminster. English history fascinates me, but so do gripping spy thrillers occurring in European and Middle Eastern settings. There’s nothing better than finishing a satisfying first book in a series—fiction or not--and deciding to ration the remaining ones so you can savor the experience a little longer!
Rosenberg, whose knowledge of Israeli and U.S. politics provides a great background for his writing, has produced several series, all of which are excellent. But if you’re new to this author, I recommend reading this book first. His political thrillers are spellbinding, especially since Rosenberg foretold the 9/11 disaster and the killing of Saddam Hussein in his novels. InThe Last Jihad, Saddam is hell-bent on attacking the West. On the eve of a treaty signing that may ensure peace for Israel and Palestine, the Israelis discover an Iraqi Scud missile armed with a nuclear warhead. It’s clear that Hussein is planning an attack on major U.S. cities and Tel Aviv, and Israel issues an ultimatum to the USA—take Saddam out or we’ll do it instead. This book is a fascinating tale about events that are as real and as possible as today’s newscasts.
When Iraqi terrorists wreak havoc on the world, White House advisor Jon Bennett must complete a billion-dollar oil deal--the basis for a historic Arab-Israeli peace treaty--or the world will face the threat of nuclear devastation.
I lived in the former Soviet Union for ten years, primarily in Moscow, the home of many a brutal tyrant. My obsession with dictator literature began after I discovered that Saddam Hussein had written a romance novel, following which I spent many years reading the literary output of all of the 20th century’s most terrible tyrants, from Mussolini to Stalin to the Ayatollah Khomeini. This monumental act of self-torture resulted in my critically acclaimed book The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, And Other Catastrophes of Literacy.
Most books about dictators are written by scholars and academics, but Peter York has a different background — he is a style guru and cultural commentator who writes about trends for magazines and newspapers in the UK.His approach, therefore, is very different from the other books on this list and in Dictator Style he casts a witty, acerbic eye over the interior design choices of some of the world’s most evil men. Multiple photographs are provided to document their crimes against taste, and York skewers everything from the leopard skin rug of Romania’s Nicolae Ceacescu to the soft porn sci-fi fantasy paintings collected by Saddam Hussein. Whereas most authors focus on the depths of evil contained in each dictator’s soul, Yorke shines a spotlight on their shallows, revealing in the process that they are also frequently banal and vulgar in their tastes, and easily seduced by shiny baubles.
Welcome to the fabulous lifestyles of the cruel and despotic. Running with the idea that our homes are where we are truly ourselves, Peter York's wildly original and scathingly funny look at the interior decorating tastes of some of history's most alarming dictators proves that absolute power corrupts absolutely, right down to the drapes. Mining rare, jaw-dropping photographs of interiors now mostly (thankfully) destroyed, York's hilarious profiles of 16 inner sanctums of the scary leaves no endangered tiger pelt unturned, from Saddam Hussein's creepy private art collection to General Noriega's Christmas tree to the strange tube and knob contraption in…
I loved the simplicity of the story and the care of the writing in this book.
A man commits a crime and plans to disappear and never be found. This book is so easy to track because it follows the main character through his many efforts to not draw the attention of the authorities, which is not easy in this day and age of electronic breadcrumbs and video surveillance everywhere. He settles in a small town, renting a space on Sugar Street, and tries to keep a low profile, but the low-life characters he comes across—a byproduct of efforts to stay off the grid and deal strictly with cash transactions—make that difficult. The characters (ranging from his landlord to a bad cop) are rendered with precise authenticity.
I found this novel to be an engaging and fast read.
'Part of the power of Sugar Street lies in its style . . . in the prose you can feel the adrenaline of [the protagonist's] initial flight wearing off , his life shrinking down to a couple of city blocks . It's brilliantly done' Guardian
'A deft punch of a novel from Jonathan Dee . . . [he] creates a true page-turner out of simple materials and the result is a troubling and stimulating look at real American life - at the fix that materialism plus the information state has got us into. It's also very funny' George Sanders
I first became interested in the Kurds during a 1998 journey I took to Iran to work on my first book about the Middle East, Neither East nor West. While there, I traveled to Sanandaj, Iran’s unofficial Kurdish capital, where I was immediately struck by how different the area seemed from the rest of the Islamic Republic—heartbreaking in its lonesome beauty, and defiant. Despite a large number of Revolutionary Guards on the streets, the men swaggered and women strode. These people are not cowed, I thought—no wonder they make the Islamic government nervous. I had to find out more.
Everywhere I traveled in Kurdistan, I was invited into homes to have a cup of tea—and so was reminded again and again of this captivating book by an English barrister and linguist who traveled to the region in 1993. Through her work, the suffering of the Kurds, especially women, under Saddam Hussein’s regime comes vividly to life, as does their courage, strong sense of family and place, and indomitable spirit.
I am a veteran novelist who believes this over all else: The opening is everything. This has been my modus operandi as a storyteller for over thirty books, as well as a half dozen screenplays. I love a great opening. It is how a reader or viewer will subconsciously decide whether they will devote themselves to a story. It is the first kiss. The first shot over the bow. The ignition, the countdown, and the launch. It is the alpha and omega… because the beginning dictates the ending. Oh my, how I love the beginning!
“The man with ten minutes to live was laughing.” Thus begins one of the greatest war novels by one of the greatest living writers of espionage thrillers.
Frederick Forsyth’s epic story of the Persian Gulf War mingles fact with fiction, and never lets up its humming current of suspense. Incidentally, that laughing man was Gerald Vincent Bull, a real historical figure who invented a super-gun for Saddam Hussein. Not exactly the safest line of work.
His assassination triggered a Rube Goldberg series of events that only Forsyth would have the… well… foresight to use as the first sentence in this violent, epochal tale.
From behind-the-scenes decision making of the Allies to the secret meeting of Saddam Hussein's war cabinet, from the brave American fliers running dangerous missions over Iraq to a heroic young spy planted deep in the heart of Baghdad, Forsyths incomparable storytelling keeps the suspense at a breakneck pace.
Peopled with vivid characters, brilliantly displaying the intricacies of intelligence operations moving back and forth between Washington and London, Baghdad and Kuwait, and revealing espionage tradecraft as only Frederick Forsyth can, The Fist of God tells the utterly convincing story of what may actually have happened behind the headlines.
