Love Who Owns Antiquity?? Readers share 100 books like Who Owns Antiquity?...

I read and reread this suspense novel as a teen, wanting to live vicariously through Victoria Jones — a bored twenty-something working as a temp in 1950’s London, yearning for adventure. After being fired for the umpteenth time, Victoria impulsively takes a job as a travel companion for an invalid heading to Baghdad, where political intrigue bubbles beneath the surface of the city. When a spy unexpectedly dies in her bedroom, Victoria finds herself on the run, and must hide out in an archaeological dig in the middle of the desert. Plot twists and unlikely romance culminate in a rather clever ending. Agatha Christie’s own experiences on digs in the Middle East lend this book the distinct flavor of that time period. If only the role of “travel companion” still existed today — sign me up!

I have recommended this novel as it is one of the few to come out of the Iraq war written by an Iraqi writer, telling its story from the point of view of the local Iraqis. 

Hadi, an old junk dealer, dismayed by the hasty burials of incomplete bodies after the daily bombings, puts together a body from the parts he finds. This composite body, he calls “Whatsitsname,” becomes possessed with the soul of a bombing victim and sets about killing those responsible for turning Baghdad into a slaughterhouse.

Blending its style between war fiction, horror, and fantasy, this darkly effective satire of the fatal logic of sectarianism follows Whatsitsname as he expands his scope, claiming: “There are no innocents who are completely innocent, and no criminals who are completely criminal.”

To understand cities today, you also have to understand why and how they were built to begin with. After all, our environment contains the materialization of previous decisions – we should know why those were made! Through the story of over a dozen global cities, historian Ben Wilson demonstrates how cities are concentrations of hopes, dreams, power, and conflict. While many great historians like Lewis Mumford and Stephen Hall have preceded him with excellently detailed urban history books of their own, this book stands out in its readability, attention to detail, and especially its coverage of global cities. After all, the urban future of most of the world lies beyond the Global North, and this broad survey shows the vast differences in urbanism between cultures.

“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. 

This compelling history of the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division’s armored spearhead into Baghdad details the coup de main that broke the Saddam’s regime’s grip on Iraq. Rich with exploits of individual soldiers, tank operations, and combat this nonfiction work relates the initial success in the war when victory seemed obtainable in months not years. I thoroughly enjoy this history because it illustrates the early war’s events accurately without politicized narrative and details just how daring and complicated this decisive attack was. If more people read this history, then our society could remember and have a fairer discourse on the Iraq War.

Few cities in history have had powerful claims to be at the center of the world: Rome in the ancient world, Constantinople in the early Middle Ages, London in the late 19th century, and Washington during the early Cold War. To this we need to add another city: Baghdad from the 9th to 11th centuries. Not only was it at the center of the most powerful and united Islamic dynasty, it accumulated and created the greatest library and center for learning in world history. With an empire stretching from India to North Africa, the Abbasids were the hub for global trade, intellectual life, and military strength. This book tells the story of the dynasty and their capital, a remarkable city with incredible technology, religious dynamism, and tolerance for diversity. It’s a captivating story, well-told and deserving of more attention. 

As most Western media, from CNN on down, parroted the Bush administration’s talking points on the Iraq War, intellectually curious Americans turned to blogs written by Iraqis who gave first-person accounts of the war. I was riveted by the blogs of a 24-year-old Iraqi woman, an engineer, who posted under the pseudonym Riverbend, “I’m female, Iraqi, and 24. That’s all you need to know. It’s all that matters these days anyway,” she wrote in her first post on Aug. 17, 2003.

From 2003 to 2004, Riverbend wrote prolifically about life under American Occupation. The blogs were compiled into this book in 2005. Riverbend cataloged and chronicled life in wartime—a litany of rations of food, water, gas, and electricity; bombings, raids, and kidnappings; and the emotional and financial toll on her family as their ordinary middle-class lives were destroyed by the war.

Intelligent and opinionated, Riverbend gave a comprehensive testimony on… show more.

My wife and I felt a kinship with Bonnie when we discovered her writing, or maybe she was just the person we wanted to be.

She is a New York Times journalist, a surfer, and a swimmer. Although she lives in San Francisco, she has spent some time living in Australia (Sydney, where we live), and she has experienced some of our local swimming spots, as well as many in California (her locals).

In this book, Bonnie artfully expresses the intangible feelings many of us feel about swimming and water and how we engage with it as humans. The best writers can articulate feelings and experiences in a way that makes you feel seen. This is one of those books for me.  

Before his untimely and tragic death, Anthony Shadid was one of the brightest foreign correspondents working in the Middle East, and his prose reads, at times, like poetry.

This book is beautiful, haunting, and unique. It taught me the value of covering war not by looking at what happens on the frontline but by turning towards society and the people affected by it—something I sought to do in my own book about the Afghan war nearly two decades later.