Customer Reviews

I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This truly amazing book tells two stories. The main story is of course the beautiful, modern love story between Michael and Andi. Everyone that has been in love can relate to the stories of their first couple dates, the playful yet intense arguments that you get into when first finding out about each other and the overall feeling of just wanting to be next to the person you love. The tragic end to their relationship literally made me break down and cry. It only took me a couple days to read most of the book, but it took an additional couple days just to read the last couple chapters. The final chapters are so overwhelming that I needed to stop reading every so often just to collect myself.

The second story is about the war in Iraq. I have read hundreds of books and stories about the current conflict and no other book so fully explains the war better than "I Lost My love In Baghdad." Everyone should read this book in order to fully appreciate what is happening on a day to day basis to our troops and the Iraqi people.

I fully recommend this book and encourage everyone to read it. You will not be able to put it down.

Hastings' book is a phenomenal introduction to young love and life in Baghdad. Throughout his story, there is a unique perspective on Iraq and daily life there. I could sense the intensity and constant danger ubiquitous in the country. More importantly, this story really makes me regret not having the opportunity to ever meet Andi Parhamovich. He portrays her as a beautiful, noble, vibrant young woman and her loss feels tragic even to the reader.

From prologue to last page, "I Lost My Love in Baghdad" draws its strength not from the sense of tragedy and ambition of Macbeth but the sense of tragedy and tumult of Romeo and Juliet. The war in Iraq and its healing were the proximate causes which kept Michael Hastings for Newsweek and Andrea Parhamovich for the National Democratic Institute in Baghdad but the final cause was their young love.

There is a plague on both houses in Iraq and the feel for scorching heat, armed clashes in the day and night and the indispensability of hired security hasn't come through as strongly in other visions of the war. The tragedy of every war is confirmed here and the final pages envisage Andi's final moments in all the horror of immolation, but the last line could still have been Romeo's to Juliet, "Thou art not conquer'd; beauty's ensign yet is crimson in thy lips and on thy cheeks. And death's pale flag is not advanced there"

Well worth the reading.

I teach high school history. This book gives an awesome over view of the war in Iraq. Giving heartfelt dipictions of the social consequences of war. I would encourage all to read.

I just finished reading this book. It was excellent and a must read for EVERYONE, alot of lessons to be realized in this book. It descibes life in Iraq very realisticly. Of course people are always quick to judge and put others down, however this is his story and we must remember the Author has just and still going through the unthinkable, that FORTUNATLY most of us will never have to go through, losing the Love of our Life in a war zone. I have read many many books in my time, and have NEVER been touched by a book as I was by this one, I cried like a baby, extremly sad!!

Every once in a great while, I come across a book that makes me want to grab those I love most, look them in eye, and tell them that they've GOT to read this book. "I Lost My Love in Baghdad" is one of those books.

Michael's story is riveting, topical, and also very personal. It's a veritable balancing act between risk and reward. This book will stay with me for a very long while.

It helped me to understand what being there is really like. The fact that you woke up this morning doesn't mean that you will again tomorrow. I can't imagine living in that kind of stress every single day, or the toll it takes on the body as well as the psyche.

I have a new found respect for Journalists who are trying to do a good job while trying their best to survive. Seriously, "You have GOT to read this book."

The tragedy of losing someone as close to you as your first love is unimaginably painfull. It is made even more grueling if it is under the conditions that his fiance passed away in. There are those reading this book that forget that message. I am not one of those individuals. Thank you for sharing your story with the world. Nothing could ever bring her back but maybe telling her story will make you whole.

I was taken by the story in this book about Michael Hastings and Andi Parhamovich. This is a sad story of a pointless war, a reporter caught up in himself and a woman who did not fully understand the horrors of Iraq.

Michael deserves to be noted for his honesty. He writes freely about how he put his job as a reporter over his love of his girl, Andi. Over and over and over he picks his job over the woman who loves him. He leaves her for Iraq. He hardly sees her because he is so busy following stories when she gets a job in Iraq to be near her. He cuts short visits with her to go out on "embeds" with the military. He without question put his job ahead of his love.

Yet, Michael Hastings is not original in putting work ahead of love or family. We all do that at one time or another. His story is that he most likely had a more profound moral duty to examine the matter and decide one way or the other about Andi. He needed to either leave Iraq or fess up and tell her right now it's the job over you and that's that. Whatever the case this young and beautiful girl should not have been in a war zone on some romantic escapde. Michael owed her the duty to pick love over the job and get her back to the US or tell her that he couldn't get fully focused right now on her and that she needed to leave Iraq.

His inaction and allowing Andi to follow some love whim by taking a job with an inept effort of some organization in Iraq caused this beautiful soul to get caught up in a dangerous and hate filled place that took her life.

Andi died at the hands of crazed lunatics using God to kill someone they were insanely jealous of--a successful & lovely American who was free and had a lot that these killers did not. She was clearly set up by the people she was trying to help with this ineffective effort by the group she worked for in Iraq.

Andi's mistakes were not uncommon in life--people do all kinds of things for love--it's that the type of a mistake in her case had lethal consequences.

Michael was honest in his shortcomings in regard to Andi which were many. That is to be respected. In his own way he will have to come to terms in how he let her down and then live the rest of his life.

Maybe two-and-a-half stars:
While the author's personal story, the loss of his fiancée, is certainly nothing less than tragic, the manner in which it's interwoven with the war reporting didn't work for me (not just the details of the relationship, but the way in which those details are often presented via emails, texts etc.). There were so many times when, rather than admiring him for his candor regarding his relationship issues, I sort of cringed in embarrassment at their telling. Couldn't help but wonder if he realizes how unflattering a portrait he paints of himself? With obvious hindsight, he acknowledges the folly of the Iraq invasion but that certainly doesn't stop him from seeming to revel in the whole "glamorous war correspondent" stereotype and the attendant macho man fantasies. I certainly feel compassion for the murder of this young woman and can understand that he was seeking to honor her memory in some fashion, but his often smug and self-absorbed take on the events related didn't do her memory adequate justice in my opinion despite what may have been his best intentions.

As far as the war reporting from Baghdad, there are many better accounts, Dexter Filkins' _The Forever_ War comes immediately to mind, and when in the early pages one finds such a glaring factual error as the date of the first Iraq (Gulf)War (cited herein as beginning in January 1992--it was a year earlier, it may make one question other aspects of credibility and carelessness. The fact that the author, seeking to somehow "personalize" the event of the war's start date, ties it into to his being in fifth grade at the time, may be that's part of the problem?

There are always some issues, I think, when journalists put their experiences into book form, but there are also examples (Filkins' account as noted) that show that it can be done right.

This was a very touching book written by the reporter who outed General McCrystal. It's the story of his romance, how his fiancee followed him to Baghdad, and how she died there--senselessly. It is an anti-war book, and emphasized for me why we have to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan. We should never have gone there in the first place.