Books to Take to Baghdad

Move over “Da Vinci Code” and Dr. Phil. This year Iraq is on the must-read list. With more than 200 invasion rethinks wrangling for space on bookstore shelves, picking the right title can be a quagmire. Go prepared with our list of a dozen of this year’s most popular titles, chosen from the top sellers at independent Strand Book Store in New York City and the national database of Barnes & Noble. But be sure to brief yourself on the critical backlash. Between national intelligence failures, Vulcans, WMDs and Abu Ghraib, it’s rough reading territory ahead.

Battle plan: Author:

Blowback:

The Fall of Baghdad

by Jon Lee Anderson

(Penguin Books, $24.95)

Battle plan: Part diary, part travelogue tallies the human cost of toppling Saddam Hussein through the lives of “ordinary” Iraqis, including an artist, a driver and a plastic surgeon.

Author: New Yorker contributor Anderson’s hagiographic 1997 biography of Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara broke the whereabouts of his burial site. Will Anderson’s next mission impossible be looking for spider holes in the mountains of Tora Bora?

Blowback: Anderson’s “intrepid” reporting would be stronger if he didn’t lean so heavily on “angry, repetitive ranting” among Iraqi citizens, wrote one critic. The mayhem is so overwhelming, “it perpetually risks leaving us numb,” said another.

*

Disarming Iraq

by Hans Blix

(Pantheon, $24)

Battle plan: The trials and tribulations of a U.N. weapons inspector. Sample: “It is an interesting notion that when a small minority has been rebuffed by a strong majority, it is the majority that has failed the test.” The global test?

Author: After 16 years as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the polite former U.N. weapons inspector found no evidence of Iraqi WMDs; imagine Richard Clarke reborn as Al Gore, but Swedish.

Blowback: IAEA doesn’t stand for Inspired and Engaging Authors. “Writes rather like Lord Butler,” said one reviewer. “Dry” and “lucid,” offered another. Blix looked better to the sharks in “Team America.”

*

Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror

by Richard A. Clarke (Free Press, $27)

Battle plan: America paid the price on 9/11 for the Bush administration’s obsession with finding Saddam Hussein, not Al Qaeda, guilty of masterminding global terror. “Best beach reading since Ludlum, Proust,” noted one reviewer.

Author: Disaffected former counterterrorism czar served four presidents before resigning in 2003. Has been called a “madman, out of control, power-hungry, wanted to be a hero” by former colleagues. But how’s this for product placement: released book in March, the same week he blasted President Bush before the Sept. 11 commission.

Blowback: He’d beg to differ, but Clarke does share something with the president: “It’s near impossible to find an admission by Clarke that he was not astute or erred in judgment,” wrote one reviewer.

American Soldier

by Tommy Franks with Malcolm McConnell

(Regan Books/Harper Collins, $27. 95)

Battle plan: A typical “up from Midland” story: Texas boy joins Army, earns his stripes, takes over Iraq, hires ghostwriter.

Author: Head of Central Command led U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq; Vietnam War veteran made decision to send fewer forces to Iraq to avoid getting “bogged down.”

Blowback: “Like his plan for the Iraq war, Tommy Franks’ book begins better than it ends,” wrote one reviewer. Another pointed out the suspicious exoneration Franks gives himself and his superiors of any wrongdoing.

*

Allies at War: America, Europe, and the Crisis over Iraq

by Philip H. Gordon, Jeremy Shapiro

(McGraw Hill, $29)

Battle plan: Since Iraq, transatlantic relations have gone from bad to worse. The European Union is chronically discombobulated, and a schizophrenic U.S. can’t decide whether to hide behind (read: Clinton) or shrug off (read: Bush) multilateral diplomacy.

Author: Gordon is a former director for European affairs at the National Security Council and senior fellow for U.S. strategic studies at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Shapiro is a foreign-policy studies fellow at the Brookings Institution. Getting ... sleepy ...

Blowback: Despite “quite stinging” rhetoric when it comes to French and German diplomacy, signs seem to point non for Gordon/Shapiro’s plan for European collective security. A must-read that “not many people will be pleased by,” in the words of one reviewer.

*

Naked in Baghdad: The Iraq War as Seen by NPR’s Correspondent

by Anne Garrels

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $22)

Battle plan: Garrels covers the Iraqi reaction to the U.S. invasion, un-embedded and with the help of indispensable driver Amer. She filed stories naked in a Baghdad hotel room to avoid Iraqi minders. Memo to producers of “Anderson Cooper 360”...

Author: Husband and novelist Vint Lawrence provides nickname: “Brenda Starr of the Berkshires”; orphan “Annie” in a hurry to get back in time for Garrison Keillor at Tanglewood.

Blowback: Most reviewers liked the book, though one reader spoke for irate bloggers everywhere when he said Garrels “hits me about like Peter Arnett.... Her coverage always -- always! -- makes the USA look like the bad guy.”

*

Between War and Peace

by Victor Davis Hanson

(Random House, $13.95)

Battle plan: The moral necessity of taking our war on terror to the axis of evil and beyond, while dodging sabotage attempts by elite academics at home and self-interested allies abroad.

Author: Hanson, a fruit-tree farmer turned classics scholar, is a regular contributor to the National Review; think Thomas Jefferson meets Hector meets Curtis LeMay.

Blowback: “Occasionally, Hanson’s precision-guided history lessons go astray,” one reviewer noted. Wrote another: “Hardly an essay goes by without some sophomoric gibe about lefty academics, limp-wristed Europeans and daft Hollywood celebrities.”

*

Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib

by Seymour M. Hersh

(Harper Collins, $29.95)

Battle plan: Following his series of New Yorker articles exposing the scandal of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, Hersh hammers at the Bush administration’s “eye-for-an-eye” policies, its fractious relations with the CIA and the trail of bloodied hands leading from Guantanamo, to Iraq, back to Washington.

Author: From My Lai to Abu Ghraib, Pulitzer Prize-winner Hersh has covered the military scandals of our time; think Kitty Kelley in camo.

Blowback: Hersh’s eighth book is “densely written,” with often “tenuous arguments that get lost in the flow of detail and allegation.”

*

Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet

by James Mann

(Viking Press, $25.95)

Battle plan: They’re the Superfriends, saving the world from their base at the Hall of Justice. No, wait, they’re the “Vulcans” -- Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Powell, Armitage and Rice -- running the Iraq war from their base at the Pentagon.

Author: Former Times correspondent is a China expert and the senior writer in residence at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Blowback: “For all of its obvious, high-minded seriousness ... this is a frustrating, though valuable, read,” said one review. Leaving Bush out of the inner circle, another critic thought, was like “writing a book about the Steelers’ coaching staff while largely ignoring Bill Cowher.” Another called it “giving us the doughnut but not the hole.”

*

The Iraq War

by John Keegan

(Knopf, $24.95)

Battle plan: Top living military historian indulges his appetite for a good war saga. An amuse-bouche in Mesopotamia, a tasting menu through history, and, finally, the three-chapter main course: the quick boil of Baghdad and the delicious fall of Saddam Hussein.

Author: Knighted in 2000, the author of “The Face of Battle” covered the Falklands War for the Spectator under the pseudonym Patrick Desmond.

Blowback: Dyspepsia. “Keegan’s style at times is Tom Clancy,” wrote one British reviewer, who noted that “his standards of scholarly research seem to be slipping.” Wrote another: “Keegan proves to be an inadequate guide to the tangled questions” emerging from the Iraq invasion.

*

The March Up: Taking Baghdad with the United States Marines

by Bing West, Ray L. Smith

(Bantam, $24.95)

Battle plan: Toppling Baghdad, a Marine’s eye-view. The title alludes to the story of an Athenian general who fought in the Persian Empire in 401 BC and won countless victories.

Author: Long before they embedded themselves with the 1st Marine Division for the war, West and Smith fought as Marines in Vietnam; Smith served in Grenada and Beirut and earned three Purple Hearts, while West became assistant secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration.

Blowback: John McCain said “this is the face of war as only those who have fought it can describe it.” “You will not put it down ... a winner for students of warfare,” said one review. Another noted, “Makes the readers hear, see and feel the fighting.” Everyone agrees: War totally rocks!

*

Plan of Attack

by Bob Woodward

(Simon & Schuster, $28)

Battle plan: 467 gossip-soaked pages makes Hersh look like Keegan. This is the be-all end-all WhoWhatWhereWhenWhyHow of Bush’s preemptive war on Iraq.

Author: A Washington institution since 9/11 (‘73, that is), the assistant managing editor of the Washington Post earned his stripes breaking Watergate because the story was too grubby for the aristocrats of the national desk.

Blowback: “Woodward’s methods -- relying on interviews and occasional media references, with little historical perspective or analysis -- remain flawed,” said one critic. “Writing ... has never been his strength,” quipped another. “ ‘Plan of Attack’ ... is a stranger to anything resembling emotive prose, narrative ingenuity, or analytic power.”

Review sources: Anderson: New York Times, Village Voice; Blix: Times of London Higher Education Supplement, AP; Clarke: New York Observer, Weekly Standard, Forbes; Franks: New York Times, Houston Chronicle; Gordon/Shapiro: Foreign Affairs, The World Today, Weekly Standard; Garrels: www.rmcrob.com; Hanson: New York Times, Washington Post; Mann: Salon, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, New York Times; Hersh: Times of London; Keegan: Christchurch Press, Washington Post, New York Times; West/Smith: Book jacket, Marine Corps Gazette, Leatherneck Magazine; Woodward: Foreign Affairs, the New Yorker.

*

-- Compiled by Sarah Grausz