In the spring of 2005, Ian Klaus, a twenty-six-year-old Rhodes Scholar, traveled eight hours from Turkey, via broken-down taxi and armed convoy, to reach Salahaddin University in Arbil, the largest city in Iraqi Kurdistan. Elvis Is Titanic is the poignant, funny, and eye-opening story of the semester he spent there teaching U.S. history and English in the thick of the war for hearts and minds.

Inspired by the volunteerism of so many young Americans after 9/11, Klaus exchanges the abstraction of duty for an intimate involvement with individual lives, among them Mahir, a rakish Kurdish pop star whose father, an imam, disapproves of music; Ali, an Anglomaniac professor of translation devoted to the BBC, with whom Klaus has a public showdown over Hemingway; and Sarhang, Klaus’s bodyguard, whose interest in American history is excited by Mel Gibson’s performance in The Patriot. Among the Kurds, a perennially oppressed but seemingly indomitable people, Klaus encounters both openhearted welcome and resentful suspicion—and soon learns firsthand how far even a trusted stranger can venture in this society. With assignments ranging from Elvis to Ellington, from the mysteries of baseball to the aperçus of Tocqueville, Klaus strives to illuminate the American way for charges initially far more attuned to our pop culture than our national ideals.

These efforts occasion Klaus’s own reexamination of truths we hold to be self-evident, as well as the less exalted cultural assumptions we have presumed to export to the rest of the world. His story, as full of hope and discovery as he finds his students, offers a slice of life behind the headlines.

“What happens when a Rhodes scholar ventures into Iraqi Kurdistan in the hope of teaching the history of American civilization? Is he risking his life on a futile conceit? How can his generation of Americans, schooled in democratic idealism, possibly hope to connect with young Kurds, survivors of oppression caught now in the struggle between modernity and Islamic fundamentalism? Ian Klaus brings us face to face, one on one, with his students, ‘souls on hold’ he calls them. The encounters, sensitively related, are at once revealing, moving, hilarious, and exciting. This is an important book, the very pith of history.”

Tina Brown

“Instructive and valuable . . . Readers will meet a sophisticated and motivated classroom of students . . . Klaus’s sensitivity to his environs, his knowledge of the region’s history, and his even-handed observations take his narrative beyond simple memoir.”

Stephen J. Lyons, Chicago Sun-Times

“America’s unspoken overseas empire is not solely the handiwork of soldiers. Many civilians, too, have played their part in exporting the American idea of freedom to faraway foreign countries. In Elvis Is Titanic, Ian Klaus has written a marvelous memoir of his time as a teacher of American history in Iraq, as that country teetered precariously on the threshold between liberation and civil war. Valiantly trying to explain the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. to a classroom of incredulous Kurds, Klaus discovers what it really means to fight the battle for ‘hearts and minds.’ Disarmingly honest, seriously funny and utterly absorbing, this book does for Iraq what Graham Greene's The Quiet American did for Vietnam. It will endure as testimony long after this empire is one with Nineveh and Tyre."

Niall Ferguson, author of Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire

In the spring of 2005, Klaus traveled from Turkey to Salahaddin University in Arbil, the largest city in Iraqi Kurdistan. This is his poignant, funny, and uplifting story of the semester he spent there teaching U.S. history and English in the thick of the war.

Ian Klaus, who now lives in New York City and Cambridge, Massachusetts, wrote for publications across the United States while he was in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is currently pursuing a doctorate in history at Harvard.