Blinded by the Sunlight; Emerging from the Prison of Saddam's Iraq Hardcover - 2004

New York: HarperCollins, 2004. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Benjamin Lowy (Jacket photograph) and Isaac Guzman. xiv, [2], 284, [2] pages. Illustrations (color). Signed by the author on the fep. A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Iraqi prison survivor shares the story of his incarceration and the dangerous obstacles that were overcome to secure his release, in a personal account that also gauges the prospects of Iraqis during and after Saddam Hussein's rule. Matt McAllester is a prize-winning journalist and a contributing editor at Details magazine. He is author of Bittersweet: Lessons from My Mother's Kitchen, Blinded by Sunlight: Surviving Abu Ghraib and Saddam's Iraq, and Beyond the Mountains of the Damned: The War inside Kosovo. Matthew McAllester began writing for Newsday, first as a Long Island reporter, during which time he shared the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Newsday's coverage of the crash of TWA Flight 800; and later as Newsday's cyberspace reporter and columnist. Derived from a Kirkus review: A penetrating record of the last days of Saddam's Iraq. Newsday correspondent McAllester came to Baghdad under the burden of fate-tempting restrictions: "Unable to obtain regular journalist visas, we had entered Iraq on journalists-with-human-shields visas, which only allowed us to cover the activities of the peace activists who said they were determined to bunk down at facilities such as hospitals and schools in the hope of preventing bombing attacks." No story there, of course, so McAllester and his photographer wander through the glowing streets of the capital in the wake of the Allies' air assaults, looking for the Big Story. The tales that make their way into these pages are fascinating: Uday Hussein's unhappiness over "the accurate American targeting of his real estate," a door-to-door search for a downed American pilot, the gloomy certainty of Iraqi dissidents that the American assault would be half-hearted and that Saddam would remain in power. McAllester's narrative takes a darker twist when, soon after the bombs begin to fall, he is arrested on suspicion of espionage and spirited away to Abu Ghraib, Iraq's worst prison. His imprisonment and interrogation were far less than homegrown opponents of the regime had to endure, of course. Still, they were plenty bad, even though he had prepared for the eventuality by having taken a survival-in-hostile-conditions course a few months earlier. Freed a few days before the Marines arrived in Baghdad, McAllester enjoys a rare moment: the chance to confront one of his captors, who calmly explains that he was just doing his job in a country that, as McAllester portrays it, was itself one big prison. A memorable addition to the literature of modern war.