Red Zone: Five Bloody Years in Baghdad

by Oliver Poole

Book Overview

How do you cheer on your national football team when you're terrified to step outside your front door? What's it like to go to the shops when your biggest fear is being blown up by a suicide bomber? Or to risk being shot at a roadblock when you're driving your pregnant wife to hospital? Oliver Poole first arrived in Baghdad in 2003 in an American armoured vehicle, having witnessed first-hand the first weeks of fighting. The city would then became...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0244988129
• ISBN13: 9780244988128
• Release Date: August 2018
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Length: 340 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.8" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Possibly Best Iraq War Book Yet

I've only read a fraction of the books written on the war/occupation of Iraq, and even those are a large pile. It's tough to choose the best one, but one of the most readable and informative has got to be this one. This is also perhaps the book most likely to engage war supporters and make them think without being didactic and without pulling any punches. The title is accurate enough, but the book describes bloody and less bloody periods, and takes the reader all around Iraq, to neighboring countries, and to England. We see the war from the perspective of journalists, soldiers, and Iraqis from all sorts of backgrounds. We gain a better understanding of five years' worth of headlines as major events are incorporated in a tale of social changes and the experiences of individual characters. Truly a brilliantly done book by a long-time reporter for the British newspaper, the Telegraph. Sadly, the Telegraph got a new editor and began insisting on pro-war propaganda. And sadly for us if not him, Poole settled down in England and started a family. So, the war goes on, short one reporter. And it didn't have many to spare.