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For those who desire a taste of what occupied Iraq feels and smells and tastes like for the war correspondents, soldiers and Iraqis dealing with the mess that is “free” Iraq, The Freedom is essential reading.
[Parenti] has an eye for the perfect image, a wonderful ear for dialogue and a prose style that floats across the page.
The Freedom, a short, fast-paced book, scenic like a good film script, is steeped in the irony and horror of war.
The Freedom
Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq
paperback
$14.95 / £7.99
—AKEEL, A TWENTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD BAGHDAD RESIDENT, ON LIFE IN THE NEW IRAQ
Consistently compared with the work of Hunter S. Thompson and Michael Herr, The Freedom provides a fearless and unsanitized tour of the disastrous occupation of Iraq, in all its surreal and terrifying detail. Drawing on the best tradition of war reporting, here is a rare book that “embeds” with both sides—the U.S. military and the Iraqi resistance.
Acclaimed journalist Christian Parenti takes us on a high-speed ride along treacherous roads to the centers of the ongoing conflict in Fallujah, Ramadi, and Sadr City through the first year of the occupation. He introduces us to relatives waiting anxiously outside the holding fortress of Abu Ghraib and takes a night drive around Baghdad with the insurgents. He recounts the military’s use of drugs and prostitutes, the imperial buffoonery of the Green Zone, and the religious ecstasy of the Shiites. And he allows us to witness, close-up and in riveting detail, the cataclysmic violence, rampant gangsterism, and quotidian heroism that is today’s Iraq.
As predicted by the San Francisco Bay Guardian, when “historians of tomorrow start writing, they will doubtless have copies of The Freedom close at hand.”
Christian Parenti is the author of The Soft Cage and Lockdown America. He is a visiting fellow at the CUNY Graduate School’s Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, and his articles appear regularly in The Nation. He lives in New York City.
Fall 2005
paperback
5 1/4 x 7 1/2, 224 pages
978-1-59558-037-5
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