Journalist Packer to discuss book

Journalist Packer to discuss book

BY JENNIFER EVANS
Rice News staff

As America was preparing for war against Iraq, New Yorker writer George Packer “belonged to the tiny, insignificant camp of ambivalently pro-war liberals.”

George Packer

However, his mind changed after reporting the conflict from occupied Iraq and researching the war’s genesis, execution and effects. His observations of the wartime carnage and the decisions surrounding it are laid out in his newly released book, “The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq,” which is garnering acclaim as the most comprehensive journalistic account of America’s most controversial foreign venture since Vietnam.

Packer will be at Rice University Oct. 31 to discuss this book as well as his other writings and his experiences as a journalist. Titled “Iraq and the Art of Journalism,” the lecture will be at 4:30 p.m. in 100 Herring Hall and is open to the public.

The book, which will be available for purchase at the lecture, brings to life the people and ideas that created the Bush administration’s war policy and led America to the Assassins’ Gate, the main point of entry into the American Zone in Baghdad. The publisher’s Web site said the book describes the place of the war in American life: the ideological battles in Washington that led to chaos in Iraq, the ordeal of a fallen soldier’s family and the political culture of a country too bitterly polarized to realize such a vast and morally complex undertaking.

Salon.com described “The Assassins’ Gate” as “the best book yet about the Iraq war,” and Publisher’s Weekly said Packer has shown himself to be among the best chroniclers the war has produced.

Packer is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of several other books, including “Blood of the Liberals,” winner of the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Award. He wrote a series of articles for The New Yorker, called “War After the War,” relaying stories of individual Iraqis and Americans and offering a broad, comprehensive view of the conflict. He has also written on the atrocities committed in Sierra Leone, on the civil unrest in the Ivory Coast and on the Al-Jazeera satellite news channel. Packer has written two novels, “The Half Man” and “Central Square.”