The media coverage of the war in Iraq is almost as much of an upheaval as the war itself in this engrossing memoir. New York Times
reporter Feuer is yanked from the Bronx bureau and dropped into the Middle East just as the bombs start to fall on Baghdad. At the mercy both of events and high-handed editors, he struggles to make his way into Iraq and gain some perspective on the unfolding chaos that he can communicate to readers. Feuer's is a perceptive insider's account of the making of the news, filled with vivid sketches of fellow journalists and with the nuts-and-bolts details of stalking and seducing sources and piecing stories together from illegible notes in the face of near-impossible deadlines. It's also a trenchant, at times self-lacerating, critique of the media itself and its shallowness and isolation, its swarming of shell-shocked Iraqis, its drive to reduce human tragedy to poignant sound bites. Written in the third person, with a novelistic density and introspection, Feuer's muscular prose interrogates his own class anxieties and his longing for manhood and authentic experience, using them as a window into the dynamics that led America to war. The result is a fresh, personal take on the Iraqi adventure. (June)
