The Iraq War has unleashed such a torrent of opinion - impassioned polemic, neo-con apologia, world-weary cynicism - that it feels like the important truths are being lost in a media feeding-frenzy. Eliot Weinberger eschews the rehtoric of the soapbox in an extraordinary montage of facts, sound bites and testimonies. He assembles an uncompromising and blackly comic narrative, which permits the voices of the war to speak for themselves, and allows the protagonists to damn themselves in their own words.
This pocket-sized volume is vast in scope, a work unlike any other you have read on Iraq, which finds an unexpected eloquence in its refusal to join in the facile grand-standing and selective amnesia of so much contemporary commentary.

Eliot Weinberger is an essayist and translator. His recent works include the National Book Critics Circle-nominated What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles; What I Heard About Iraq; and most recently, The Ghost of Birds and with Octavio Paz 11 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei He won The National Book Critics award for criticism for his translations of Borges. And PEN's first Gregory Kolovakos Award for promoting Hispanic literature in the US, and he is America's first literary writer to receive Mexico's Order of the Aztec Eagle. He lives in New York City.