Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War

"In an incisive and eloquent new book, the Washington Post reporter Anthony Shadid tells the story of a man named Sabah, who is accused of being a United States informer in the town of Thuluyah . . . Sabah's story is only one of many tragic stories to be found in Night Draws Near, a book that gives a harrowing portrait of life in postwar Iraq and the fallout that the American war has had on ordinary Iraqi civilians, from a 14-year-old girl coping with the bombing of Baghdad to a 62-year-old academic and former Baath Party member to the reporter's own 'fixer' and government minder, Nasir Mehdawi, who would later become a colleague and friend . . . The volume draws heavily upon Mr. Shadid's reporting for The Washington Post. (His dispatches from Iraq won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting.) It leaves the reader with a devastating sense of the gap between the war's aims and its aftermath and the gap between the administration's rhetoric and the realities on the ground . . . Mr. Shadid does a fluent job of pulling all this information into a riveting narrative that is animated by his up-close and personal portraits of individual Iraqis. At the same time Night Draws Near—much like Larry Diamond's book Squandered Victory, which appeared this summer—also provides a damning account of the Bush administration's failure to prepare adequately for the postwar occupation of Iraq, and of its missteps and miscalculations in the wake of toppling Saddam Hussein."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

 

"A must read for anyone who wants to better understand Islam and its humanity."—The Washington Post

"This is a reporter's book—a superb reporter's book—that tells more than anyone needs to know about George Bush's war in Iraq. It is careful, objective, and, above all, honest."—Seymour Hersh, author of Chain of Command

"Night Draws Near, unlike everything that has come before it, explains Iraqis to their distant American occupiers. Shadid, an Arabic-speaking reporter for The Washington Post, has been an invaluable guide for anyone attempting to comprehend Iraq, providing a level of detail, context, and understanding that has escaped all but his ablest colleagues. In his telling—emotionally resonant and always deeply perceptive—the complex path Iraqis followed from cautious optimism to frustration to insurgency becomes clear for the first time. Through the eyes of the Iraqis, Shadid offers a wealth of insight into phenomena Americans must contend with as long as we occupy Iraq: the fury of offended Iraqi patriotism, the resurgence of religion among the toppled Sunnis, the besiegement of the Iraqi citizens, and the meaning of the new Shia politics that the United States has ushered to power. He has achieved nothing short of authoring the first classic, indispensable account of the Iraqi War."—Spencer Ackerman, The American Prospect

 

"No one writing about Iraq today understands that tormented country and its people better than Anthony Shadid. Night Draws Near tells a timeless and powerful story of individuals caught in war's crossfire."—Rick Atkinson, author of In the Company of Soldiers and the Pulitzer Prize-winning An Army at Dawn

"For a decade and more, Iraq has been the central American obsession—our enemy, our dark double, our evil twin. Largely missing from this drama, however, have been the people who inhabit that land. Now, in an epic work of reporting, Anthony Shadid restores to the people of Iraq their humanity. In a powerful yet intimate narrative, teeming with people and incident, he manages to make the Iraqis breathe and, in so doing, introduces us to a people who have been forced to know much more about Americans than we about them. This is an essential book." —Mark Danner, author of Torture and Terror: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror