- Paperback: 336 pages
- Publisher: Reportage Press (17 Mar 2008)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0955830257
- ISBN-13: 978-0955830259
- Product Dimensions: 21.2 x 13.8 x 2.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 721,748 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Review
A brilliant, first-hand account of the madness and horror of post invasion Iraq. Poole demonstrates perfect pitch, recounting a story that is by turns terrifying and bizarre, illuminating and moving. --Patrick Bishop, author of Fighter Boys
Product Description
This eyewitness account by former Telegraph correspondent reveals the truth about Baghdad's Red Zone and is the most personal account of the war to be published. 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 risk being shot at a roadblock when you drive your pregnant wife to hospital? As the Daily Telegraph's Iraq correspondent, Oliver Poole arrived in Baghdad in 2005. For the next two years his home would be a hotel room in the middle of Baghdad's Red Zone , one of the most dangerous places on earth. Oliver describes daily life in a largely unreported civil war. He tells how the war changed the life of Oliver, the young Englishman, his interpreter Ahmed and his family (pregnant sister-in-law blown up as she is teaching a class of children, brother-in-law kidnapped and murdered, another brother kidnapped, family forced to flee). As he travelled across Iraq with British and US troops Oliver Poole witnessed first hand the bloody impact of car bombs and had his own offices destroyed by a suicide bomber. Finally in November 2006, with the Telegraph closing down his office, Oliver Poole joined the masses escaping Iraq through Baghdad airport. Percentage of proceeds to go to the charity International Pen, who helped Poole's translator flee from the terrorists trying to kill him for working for a foreigner.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Before anything, I should declare a couple of interests here. I'm a former colleague of Oliver's in Baghdad, and I have also got my own book out about Iraq, which covers similar ground to his. Which, in a self-serving way, meant I was secretly hoping that this book wouldn't be much good. Alas, as anyone who's read Oliver's first book on Iraq, Black Knights, will testify, there was no chance of that. Red Zone is a superbly informative and engrossing read, be it for the Iraq anorak like myself, or for someone who knows nothing about the place and wants one single, easy-to-read book that will tell them all. Speaking as someone who's spent a lot of time there myself, I can also testify to the difficulty of the conditions under which Oliver was reporting. Most journalists pulled out when things started getting really dangerous in 2005 - Oliver, however, stuck it out, and as such has penned one of the very few accounts of the period when Iraq really went into its darkest hours.
Anyway, enough from me. Read it. There a lot of books about Iraq around, but this is one of the few very good ones (apart from mine of course....)
Anyway, enough from me. Read it. There a lot of books about Iraq around, but this is one of the few very good ones (apart from mine of course....)
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Oliver Poole worked as a foreign correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, covering both the invasion and the subsequent occupation of Iraq and you get a sense (although he never claims it) that there are not many non-Iraqi journalists who can bring five years of on-the-ground experience to bear when commenting on what has happened to this country.
His experience results in an insightful book on an incredibly complex situation and importantly for us, his audience, it's written in an approachable and enjoyable way. It may have been the years he spent explaining complex issues to middle-England in a couple of paragraphs, but he's also managed to make it a very good read.
The book isn't easy to categorise; it's part travelogue, part history of the war, part social commentary, part memoir and part analysis of the insurgency and the surge, but this breadth was what actually appealed to me most. Having read it I now have some insight into why it all went so wrong, and given how complex the situation has been over the last five years that's a great achievement because it's very complicated. While it's a good read, and Poole wrote for the Telegraph, this is not a middle-of-the-road book, it's challenging. It challenges preconceptions, it challenges your belief in the US and UK Governments and what they've asked their armed forces to do, as well as what's driving Islamic 'extremism'.
At this point I declare I know the author, but when I reviewed his last book online it didn't get 5 stars, but this gets the full five, because it's a very good book.
His experience results in an insightful book on an incredibly complex situation and importantly for us, his audience, it's written in an approachable and enjoyable way. It may have been the years he spent explaining complex issues to middle-England in a couple of paragraphs, but he's also managed to make it a very good read.
The book isn't easy to categorise; it's part travelogue, part history of the war, part social commentary, part memoir and part analysis of the insurgency and the surge, but this breadth was what actually appealed to me most. Having read it I now have some insight into why it all went so wrong, and given how complex the situation has been over the last five years that's a great achievement because it's very complicated. While it's a good read, and Poole wrote for the Telegraph, this is not a middle-of-the-road book, it's challenging. It challenges preconceptions, it challenges your belief in the US and UK Governments and what they've asked their armed forces to do, as well as what's driving Islamic 'extremism'.
At this point I declare I know the author, but when I reviewed his last book online it didn't get 5 stars, but this gets the full five, because it's a very good book.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Oliver Poole, who rode into the Iraq war with a US armoured brigade and subsequently returned to live there for a few years, is possibly the only person to have witnessed both sides of the equation in such depth and detail. Red Zone gives us a passionate yet unbiased insight into one of the those rare moments in history that everyone at the time recognises as having altered its course fundamentally. This an eyewitness account of life in Baghdad in recent years, of the daily grind of surviving in a world of fear by a journalist who pulls few punches, least of all about himself, his fears and his fallibility. This is a great read - took me a weekend.
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