The author at the Great Sulaimaniya Mosque in northern Iraq. January 2005.


The author with the Iraqi Army on the eve of the American-Iraqi battle to retake Fallujah. November 2004

"Spinner's fresh eyes, unlike those of more war-weathered correspondents, provide an honest look at what it means to cover a country that often appears to be coming apart at the seams. Without pretending to be a Middle East expert, Spinner focuses on her relationships with the Post's Iraqi staff, who become her family in Baghdad, and gauges how living under the constant threat of bombings and kidnappings is straining her ties with her real family back home. It is a tale she weaves well, bolstered by the moral, spiritual and literary support she gets from her twin sister, Jenny, an English professor at St. Joseph's University". The Washington Post, 2/19/06 (Read the full review here)

"The Iraq story has long needed a woman’s touch, and Jackie Spinner tells this war tale better than any account I’ve seen: how and why American journalists risk everything to report the most dangerous story on earth. She takes a welcome departure from our male-slanted view of Iraq, putting a human face on the soldiers, truck drivers, translators, American and Iraqi families, and yes, journalists as they cope with the overwhelming anxieties of life in the crosshairs". TOD ROBBERSON, correspondent, The Dallas Morning News.

"Jackie Spinner's book is not only a war memoir full of precisely detailed encounters with fear and death. It is also an odyssey of closely observed and beautiful sequenced stages of an emotional and professional life as a reporter for The Washington Post in Iraq. She pulls no punches; truth prevails over cant, over precooked templates of patriotism and its opposite, irony and sarcasm."ELLEN MICKIEWICZ, director, DeWittt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy, Duke University.

"Not just a reporter's dispatch on the Iraq war, Jackie Spinner’s book is a journalistic original and a rare insight into both a reporter’s mind and the heart of a people at war. Unlike any other chronicle of war, this book draws the reader into the lives of the subjects of journalism, the real people of a country in chaos, and make us care about them. As a journalist, I saw a side of the story I had not yet seen. As a Marine who has spent time in Iraq, I came away from this book caring more about the outcome of our nation’'s effort". ANDREW B. DAVIS, president and executive director, American Press Institute.
 
"This is a moving, personal account of a young woman’s head-first immersion into a war where she finds unexpected beauty and love and unimagined horrors and loss. Jackie Spinner offers readers of her fine, tender book important insights into a country that will for generations be intricately tied the lives of all Americans." MATTHEW MCALLESTER, Newsday correspondent and author of Blinded by the Sunlight: Surviving Abu Ghraib and Saddam’s Iraq.


Don't forget to add your own review to the book. Amazon

 

Rajiv Chandresekeran, former Baghdad bureau chief, and Jackie at a panel discussion at U of Cal at Berkeley, October 2006