<div>Riverbend, the young Iraqi woman whose &ldquo;articulate, even poetic prose packs an emotional punch,&rdquo; continues her blog from her hometown of Baghdad (The New York Times). Riverbend, the pseudonymous recipient of a Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Literary Reportage, continues her chronicle of daily life in occupied Baghdad. Drawn from her popular blog, this volume spans from October 2004 through March 2006. In her distinctively wry yet urgent prose Riverbend, now 27, tells of life in a middle-class, secular, mixed Shia-Sunni family. She describes the attacks she sees on TV, raids in her neighborhood, fuel shortages, rolling blackouts, and water shortages, all while offering insightful critiques of the Iraqi draft constitution and American Media. Riverbend reveals how, for the first time in her life, she feels lesser due to her gender. Dispelling reductive, media-driven stereotypes, she explains that most Iraqis are tolerant people, prefer secular to religious government, oppose a civil war, and desperately want the occupation to end.</div>

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Baghdad Burning II

<div>Since the fall of Bagdad, women&rsquo;s voices have been largely erased, but four months after Saddam Hussein&rsquo;s statue fell, a 24 year-old woman from Baghdad began blogging. In 2003, a twenty-four-year-old woman from Baghdad began blogging about life in the city under the pseudonym Riverbend. Her passion, honesty, and wry idiomatic English made her work a vital contribution to our understanding of post-war Iraq&mdash;and won her a large following. Baghdad Burning is a quotidian chronicle of Riverbend&rsquo;s life with her family between April 2003 and September of 2004. She describes rolling blackouts, intermittent water access, daily explosions, gas shortages and travel restrictions. She also expresses a strong stance against the interim government, the Bush administration, and Islamic fundamentalists like Al Sadr and his followers. Her book &ldquo;offers quick takes on events as they occur, from a perspective too often overlooked, ignored or suppressed&rdquo; (Publishers Weekly). &ldquo;Riverbend is bright and opinionated, true, but like all voices of dissent worth remembering, she provides an urgent reminder that, whichever governments we struggle under, we are all the same.&rdquo; &mdash;Booklist &ldquo;Feisty and learned: first-rate reading for any American who suspects that Fox News may not be telling the whole story.&rdquo; &mdash;Kirkus</div>

Baghdad Burning

<div>&ldquo;An unforgettable look at the peculiar horrors and humiliations involved in solitary confinement&rdquo; from the prisoners who have survived it (New York Review of Books). On any given day, the United States holds more than eighty-thousand people in solitary confinement, a punishment that&mdash;beyond fifteen days&mdash;has been denounced as a form of cruel and degrading treatment by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. Now, in a book that will add a startling new dimension to the debates around human rights and prison reform, former and current prisoners describe the devastating effects of isolation on their minds and bodies, the solidarity expressed between individuals who live side by side for years without ever meeting one another face to face, the ever-present specters of madness and suicide, and the struggle to maintain hope and humanity. As Chelsea Manning wrote from her own solitary confinement cell, &ldquo;The personal accounts by prisoners are some of the most disturbing that I have ever read.&rdquo; These firsthand accounts are supplemented by the writing of noted experts, exploring the psychological, legal, ethical, and political dimensions of solitary confinement. &ldquo;Do we really think it makes sense to lock so many people alone in tiny cells for twenty-three hours a day, for months, sometimes for years at a time? That is not going to make us safer. That&rsquo;s not going to make us stronger.&rdquo; &mdash;President Barack Obama &ldquo;Elegant but harrowing.&rdquo; &mdash;San Francisco Chronicle &ldquo;A potent cry of anguish from men and women buried way down in the hole.&rdquo; &mdash;Kirkus Reviews</div>

James Ridgeway
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Books By James Ridgeway (1 Book)

Hell Is a Very Small Place

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