A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East's Long War by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad

An award-winning journalist's powerful portrait of his native Baghdad, the people of Iraq, and twenty years of war. "An essential insider account of the unravelling of Iraq...Driven by his intimate knowledge and deep personal stakes, Abdul-Ahad...offers an overdue reckoning with a broken history."--Declan Walsh, author of The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State "A vital archive of a time and place in history...Impossible to put down."--Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise The history of reportage has often depended on outsiders --Ryszard Kapuściński witnessing the fall of the shah in Iran, Frances FitzGerald observing the aftermath of the American war in Vietnam. What would happen if a native son was so estranged from his city by war that he could, in essence, view it as an outsider? What kind of portrait of a war-wracked place and people might he present? A Stranger in Your Own City is award-winning writer Ghaith Abdul-Ahad's vivid, shattering response