Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

Engel is the longest serving broadcaster in Iraq and the only American television reporter to cover the country continuously before, during, and after the 2003 U.S. invasion. Fluent in Arabic, he has had unrivaled access to U.S. military commanders, Sunni insurgents, Shiite militias, Iraqi families, and even President George W. Bush, who called him to the White House for a private briefing. He has witnessed nearly every major milestone in this long war.

War Journal describes what it was like to go into the hole where U.S. Special Operations Forces captured Saddam Hussein. Engel was there as the insurgency began and watched the spread of Iranian influence over Shiite religious cities and the Iraqi government. He watched as Iraqis voted in their first election. He was in the courtroom when Saddam was sentenced to death and interviewed General David Petraeus about the surge.

In vivid, sometimes painful detail, Engel tracks the successes and setbacks of the war. He describes searching, with U.S troops, for a missing soldier in the dangerous Sunni city of Ramadi; surviving kidnapping attempts, IED attacks, hotel bombings, and ambushes; and even the smell of cakes in a bakery attacked by sectarian gangs and strewn with bodies of the executed.

War Journal describes a sectarian war that American leaders were late to understand and struggled to contain. It is an account of the author's experiences, insights, bittersweet reflections, and moments from his private video diary -- itself the subject of a highly acclaimed documentary on MSNBC.

War Journal is the story of the transformation of a young journalist who moved to the Middle East with $2,000 and a belief that the region would be "the story" of his generation into a seasoned reporter who has at times believed that he would die covering the war. It is about American soldiers, ordinary Iraqis, and especially a few brave individuals on his team who continually risked their lives to make his own daring reporting possible.

Average Customer Rating:

Great Frightening Book

Customer Rating:

This book has graphic violence and can be hard to take but really gets into the war. At times I found myself thinking that this just can't possibly be true but then I thought, no one could possibly make this up. There are a lot of scary, crazy, violent people running around Iraq. And just when you think it can't possibly get any worse, it does. The author has great insights into what is going on there and he is a sympathetic character. The way he ended the book, I get the impression he thinks the current reduction in violence is just a temporary truce while all side eliminate al Queda. Then the Shiite/Sunni civil war will start up again, with the US on the side of the Shiites.

Crystal Clear

Customer Rating:

Richard Engel makes the war in Iraq crystal clear from a number of perspectives that help the reader to understand why the war has taken the course it has over these past five years. His commentary on the differences between the religious sects and their politics as well as their response to the regime change in Iraq and the power vacuum it created along with the subsequent attempts by all parties to fill it is most enlightening. Want to know why the Iraq war has gone the way that it did, why it is changing, and what may lie in the future? Read this book!

excellent journal

Customer Rating:

i thoroughly enjoyed reading War Journal. Some of the chapters are really gruesome, but this is the reality of not only the war, but of human nature. One feels the emotions with Richard Engel as the war progress. I congratulate him for being such a brave soul and enduring all that he has been through. I highly recommend this book as an account of what really is happening in Iraq and not of the bias one hears in the media.

Great Read!	Customer Rating:
The personal details made this book much more interesting than just a blow-by-blow about the players and their politics. My only suggestions: 1) a map at the beginning of the book (even the author said that to explain all of this, a map was necessary) and 2) a glossary at the beginning of the book to explain some of the concepts in more detail.

richard engel

Customer Rating:

This book is a personal account of Engels service in Iraq as an American journalist. The book goes beyond the details we see on the nightly news and exposes the gritty, painful, and sometimes gruesome aspects of covering a war. Engel, who is fluent in Arabic, is the longest serving journalist in Iraq. Engel's knowledge of the conflict is well respected in Washington and, upon a recent return, Bush asked to meet with him to discuss his views on the war. Engel showed up with a mismatched suit and spoke frankly with the president for 90 minutes. He writes of his discussions with Bush, and the candor with which he addressed the President. He also writes about how tragic but inevitable ways in which the war affected him, his marriage, and his psyche. Speaking of the emerging civil war in Iraq, he writes, "There were fourteen car bombs, forty two roadside bombs, and twenty two shootings in Baghdad the same week. ...They were just numbers, adding up, and I was there, with my death abacus, keeping track. I didn't think I cared about the carnage. It just seemed like white noise. I didn't feel affected, but friends said I didn't look them in the eyes much anymore. I was jittery, cold, wired, hungry, and most of all detached. (p. 203) Engel eventually moved to Beirut, Lebanon, where he relished the opportunity to escape from Baghdad. The way he describes the city conjures of images of a Paris on the Mediterranean. But shortly after he arrived, a war broke out between Israel and Hezbollah. He writes, "I spent the rest of the summer reporting from destroyed villages in southern Lebanon and covering refugees in my new home. NBC's Washington bureau chief, Tim Russert, told me I was bad luck. 'Engel, don't come to Washington', he said". (p 274)