The Demonic Comedy: Some Detours in the Baghdad of Saddam Hussein - Hardcover

Roberts, Paul William

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374138230 ISBN 13: 9780374138233

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1998

Synopsis

British-born journalist Roberts collects here his interview with the Iraqi leader while covering the 1990 Arab Summit and accounts his experience as one of the few journalists to witness the devastation of civilians during the Gulf War from Baghdad itself, and his return for the International Babylon Festival in 1995. He draws on interviews with the US ambassador to argue that the Bush administration knew that the Iraqis were going to invade Kuwait and knew what Americans stood to gain by it. His style is often reminiscent of Hunter Thompson. Some of the material has been published in Saturday Night (May 1991) and Harper's (1996); the volume was first published by Stoddart Publishing in Canada in 1997. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

About this title

Review:

A filmmaker and author of, among other books, the well-received India travelogue Empire of the Soul, Paul William Roberts writes as if he were Outside magazine's British correspondent, filtering extravagant irony through a bottle of Scotch. This could be distracting in a book about a place like Iraq; sometimes, indeed, his long-range metaphors stray their course. Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine what besides laughter might get a person through the absurdities of everyday life in Baghdad, where a "political machine increasingly bent on shaping reality in its own image" has named everything after Saddam Hussein, and erected monstrous public memorials in its wake. "There's not much that is secret about Iraq's secret police, the feared Mukhabarat," Roberts writes. "Its officers all have moustaches as much like Saddam's luxuriant broom of a growth as they can manage (and most Iraqi men can manage a reasonably prodigious facsimile)."

Shifting uneasily beneath the humor, though, lies the dark heart of the story, and it becomes darker as the book continues, revealing the soullessness of government leaders, the abuse of the Iraqi people, and, of course, the unsavory details of Western involvement in that country's history. The humor Roberts brings to the book turns out to be a necessary counterweight to tragedy. --Maria Dolan

About the Author:

Paul William Roberts, a British writer and television and film producer, is the author of several books, including Empire of the Soul and In Search of the Birth of Jesus. He lives in Toronto, Canada.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0374138230
• ISBN 13: 9780374138233
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 294