Customer Reviews

Blinded by the Sunlight: Surviving Abu Ghraib and Saddam's Iraq

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

As a British expat living in the U.S. of A. I was curious about the author's experiences in Iraq given that both my native and adopted countries started the current debacle.

I don't know what the other reviewers from the UK saw in this book ("riveting prose?") but I was quite disappointed. Poorly constructed narrative that wandered this way and that often as not without reaching any point at all. Insights that were so obvious I didn't feel they merited the term. The author may be a good journalist but this book was poorly conceived and executed. Apparently this is his second book. I won't be reading his first.

the insights in this book appear so obvious or so flawed they barely merit registration. documenting the horrors of one regime and sanctioning the invasion of another are different things the author fails to have registered. one can't help feeling he's been blinded by his own, clearly appalling, experience. his insights are neither original or compelling. perhaps, as other reviewers have suggested, he should have stuck to describing his own experience and not trying to play the expert he clearly isn't. the events since this rather flaccid book's publication have shown him to be very far from the pulse of iraq. i recommend he adopt the better courage of his colleagues and stay out there long enough for his opinion to merit attention.

I went to hear Matthew McAllester speak a couple of months ago in Chicago and I was impressed with his articulateness and was really interested in reading about his personal story. That personal story was barely present in this book and what was there was a jumbled mess. A weird stream of consciousness that will confuse you even if you're well-versed on recent Iraqi history. Did McAllester write this book, or did he just give his assembled notes to some editorial assistant who tried to write a story around them? I wanted to know more about his relationships with the other journalists, with his girlfriend, with his family. The attempt at political analysis is so clearly off-base I can't believe that even the author believes it. I don't get the disparity between the moving talk I heard and the boring mess that this book is. And I recommend that others don't get it at all. Total waste of time and money.

Reading the reviews of this book it is remarkably striking that the ravi-est of reviews are coming from england where the author himself comes from. Could it that our transalantic cousins simply prefer this writing or could it that be his friends and family are trying to sway us into wanting to buy this book? Who knows. Fact is, it's a waste of time. Dull, obvious observations transposed with compelling personal fact. But ultimately has nothing to teach us from a conflict that badly needs to do so. I worked for several months in Iraq in the post war period and the Iraq I saw is not that that Matthew McAllester constructed around himself. I don't know where he was but I was in Iraq. Maybe he should have stayed longer. I worked in Kosovo and thought his book of that war fabulous. Maybe why this one is so disappointing. Or maybe it was too soon. Either way, as ever day goes by, his thesis proves more wrong by the day.

this book was a way mixed bag but not meriting some of the praise or the criticism given on this sight. this author does emotions superbly; analysis not so well. perhaps he should have decided earlier what which he wanted this book to be about.

At the centre of this book is an extraordinary tale of how a bunch of journalists got chucked into jail at the peak of the war. As a story that should have sufficed. It is genuinely fascinating in a way that makes you thing, what would I have done
in that situation? Why the author felt the need to stretch that out into a generalisation of the saddam regime, I don't get. Everyone he encounters has a story that dwarfs his entirely and thus robs his own voice of meaning. The sense you get is that he is only interest in iraqis for the way in which they can augment his own theorum and experiences. Their post war suffering goes entirely undocumented. this book is neither one thing nor another, not an account of the war or an analysis of the aftermath. It reads like an opportunity that could have been grasped but wasn't and therefore can tell us nothing enduring of the plight of the iraqi people. At worst, an ego trip; at best, a very limited view on one journalist's very limited world.

I was looking forward immensely to this book, having read much of the author's travails in the press. i was disappointed then to find he had much to tell of his own hopes and fears and far too few of the iraqi people's. the title of the book promises an inside into the trauma of a people imprisoned for decades and then released. we learn too little of their release, their "blinding in the sunlight." this book promises much but reads like a rush job. a more thoughtful exploration might have served better to reflect the suffering of the ordinary people and what must have been and still must be an epic battle to free themselves of the warped psychology of saddam's era. i hope another account, yet to be written, will serve as a better testament to history and human spirit, not just an author's ago.

This novel answers the question, "What do Iraqis think about Saddam, their government, and their country."

Matthew McAllester shares conversations with Iraqi civilians who lived under Saddam's rule since 1979. This book provides a glimpse of what the average Iraqi was thinking before, during, and after the war.

McAllester has to be a little crazy to go after a story so dangerous. I'm glad he took the risk, because I believe it makes for a great read. His story backs up the atrocities so many have already reported; Saddam's regime needed to fall. That is so obvious after reading this book.

There are a lot of negative reviews on this book. I have to assume others are not happy with McAllester's interpretation of what he discovered in Iraq. But this is HIS story, not theirs.

I think that if you are looking for someone to justify the Iraq campaign now that the WMDs are known to not exist this is the book for you. In describing the life Iraqis led under Saddam's rule the author tries to convey that Iraq's future is more promising now than it would have been if Saddam were still in power. I did not find the author's reasoning to be convincing but maybe that is because this book was not well edited. I am not sure if Mr. McAllester really understands what is going on in Iraq or if the jumbled and at times contradictory analysis is due to poor editing. I think I would have preferred if he had concentrated on presenting his own rather incredible story about being a prisoner for eight days in Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. As it is this book is neither fish nor fowl and I did not find it to be satisfying reading.

Journalists often give political analyses of situations they have reported on, and all too often reach facile and laughably naive conclusions. Such is the case with this book. The author might have given us an interesting read if he had stuck to what he is qualified to comment on: himself and his experiences as a journalist. Whether out of false modesty or an inflated sense of his grasp of the situation in Iraq, he chose to weave his personal story around the much larger, vastly more complicated, and more important story of what is happening to the Iraqi people. His conclusions about whether the Iraq invasion was warranted are unsupported, and blatantly self-serving. It can't be a coincidence that a young man who received a large advance to write a book about his experiences during the invasion of Iraq sees the campaign as necessary and ultimately for the best. It certainly was for him!