Books I Read in 2007 Part IV
Explore powerful 2007 book recommendations, featuring Imperial Life in the Emerald City and Night by Elie Wiesel in this curated reading list of history and memoirs.
Book
Imperial Life in the Emerald City
by Rajiv Chandrasekaran
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • National Book Award Finalist • This "eyewitness history of the first order ... should be read by anyone who wants to understand how things went so badly wrong in Iraq” (The New York Times Book Review). The Green Zone, Baghdad, Iraq, 2003: in this walled-off compound of swimming pools and luxurious amenities, Paul Bremer and his Coalition Provisional Authority set out to fashion a new, democratic Iraq. Staffed by idealistic aides chosen primarily for their views on issues such as abortion and capital punishment, the CPA spent the crucial first year of occupation pursuing goals that had little to do with the immediate needs of a postwar nation: flat taxes instead of electricity and deregulated health care instead of emergency medical supplies. In this acclaimed firsthand account, the former Baghdad bureau chief of The Washington Post gives us an intimate portrait of life inside this Oz-like bubble, which continued unaffected by the growing mayhem outside. This is a quietly devastating tale of imperial folly, and the definitive history of those early days when things went irrevocably wrong in Iraq.
Book
Night
by Elie Wiesel
Presents a true account of the author's experiences as a Jewish boy in a Nazi concentration camp.
