Promotional Information

From the award-winning author of The Rise of Islamic State, the essential story of the Middle East's disintegration

About the Author

Patrick Cockburn is a Middle East correspondent for the Independent and has worked previously for the Financial Times. He has written three books on Iraq's recent history, including the National Book Circle Awards- shortlisted The Occupation and Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession (with Andrew Cockburn), as well as a memoir, The Broken Boy, and, with his son, a book on schizophrenia, Henry's Demons, which was shortlisted for a Costa Award. He won the Martha Gellhorn Prize in 2005, the James Cameron Prize in 2006, and the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2009. More recently he has been awarded Foreign Commentator of the Year at the 2013 Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards, Foreign Affairs Journalist of the Year in British Journalism Award 2014, and Foreign Reporter of the Year in Press Awards 2014.

Reviews

Quite simply, the best Western journalist at work in the Middle East today.
*Seymour M Hersh*

One of the best informed on-the-ground journalists. He was almost always correct on Iraq.
*Sidney Blumenthal, in an email to Hillary Clinton*

Patrick Cockburn spotted the emergence of ISIS much earlier than anybody else and wrote about it with a depth of understanding that was just in a league of its own. Nobody else was writing that stuff at that time, and the judges wondered whether the Government should consider pensioning off the whole of MI6 and hiring Patrick Cockburn instead. The breadth of his knowledge and his ability make connections is phenomenal.
*Judges of the Foreign Affairs Journalist of the Year Award 2014*

It is a brilliant tour d'horizon of the new wars, a chronicle compiled from despatches, notes and diaries. No one could be better placed for this task and no one else could have produced such a lucid and comprehensive account.
*Evening Standard*

A compelling series of dispatches from a journalist who has learned the hard golden rule in Iraq: 'to forecast the worst possible outcome.'
*Kirkus*

His reports coalesce here, giving life and shape to the forces of terror currently shaping the region and beyond. The book serves as a strong argument for sharpening the mind of each and every politician responsible for the continuing calamity
*GQ*

Likely to be a reference for future scholars. Cockburn's dispatches make for a somber, vivid, and gripping work of eyewitness history.
*Publishers Weekly*

A fine and courageous journalist, who has displayed a sustained commitment to laying bare the tribulations of the Middle East ... This book confirms Cockburn's reputation as a reporter and analyst.
*Sunday Times*

A meticulous and blistering condemnation of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East
*Macleans*

This book is required reading for anyone who wants to try to understand the disaster. It should be compulsory reading for politicians, diplomats, defence chiefs and the academic think-tanks whose members make confident predictions, usually confounded by what follows.
*Scotsman*

Cockburn wears his opinions on his sleeve-informed opinions, that project an aura of the New (now oldish) Left-so you can get an honest take on his perspective. That perspective can be dizzying, both panoptic and intimate.
*San Francisco Chronicle*

Is the greatest living foreign correspondent in English, a writer of understated integrity and compassion, with the necessary balance of indignation and detachment
*New York Times*