Blinded by the Sunlight: Emerging from the Prison of Saddam's Iraq

by Matthew McAllester

Book Overview

Here was a prison where healthy men would beg hospital patients to spit into their mouths so that they could contract a disease and get a comfortable bed in the hospital ward. Inside these walls was a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060588195
• ISBN13: 9780060588199
• Release Date: March 2004
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Length: 284 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.4" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

It's about Saddam and the Terror-land he ruled over!

This novel answers the question, "What do Iraqis think about Saddam, their government, and their country." Matthew McAllester shares conversations with Iraqi civilians who lived under Saddam's rule since 1979. This book provides a glimpse of what the average Iraqi was thinking before, during, and after the war. McAllester has to be a little crazy to go after a story so dangerous. I'm glad he took the risk, because I believe it makes for a great read. His story backs up the atrocities so many have already reported; Saddam's regime needed to fall. That is so obvious after reading this book. There are a lot of negative reviews on this book. I have to assume others are not happy with McAllester's interpretation of what he discovered in Iraq. But this is HIS story, not theirs.

Gripping, pacey and fascinating

McAllester has written an excellent book. He succeeds in combining the narrative of his imprisonment in Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison with the larger story of what happened Iraq before and after the war. He writes sensitively but never falling into melodrama or machismo about being arrested and held for eight days in Saddam's notorious hellhole.The text is fluent, confident, measured and builds momentum all the way through. He achieves what he sets out to do - which is to paint a journalist's portrait of war, its build up and its immediate aftermath. Because he has an interesting and unique personal story to tell the book is much more readable and accessible than standard, less directioned war reportage better suited to newspapers and TV.

a boot stamping on a human face for ever

This excellently-written book brings you closer than most recent war journalism to Orwell's famous description of the brutality of dictatorship. Through the story of his own brief but terrifying incarceration in Iraq's worst prison, and through the stories of Iraqis who spent a far greater part of their lives being ground down by Saddam's machinery of violence and fear, he paints an stark picture of the mechanical, dehumanising repression of the Baathist regime. As we debate the legality of the war in Iraq and as Bush and Blair start to feel the pressure, this important book reminds of the sheer bleakness of what came before. By doing so, but without being partisan itself, it should make the reader ponder whether simply leaving it there would really have been the noblest path.

A riveting true story from the inside

This is a fascinating and insightful read. Late one night only days after the war on Iraq began, McAllester hears a knock at his door. So begins the harrowing true story of he and four fellow journalists, who were plucked from their Baghdad hotel by Saddam's secret service officers and terrifyingly imprisoned. As he is stripped of all his possessions, McAllester chillingly recalls words learned in hostile environment training, "Be worried if they don't blindfold you or put your head in a bag. That means they don't care if you see their faces. That means they might already be planning to kill you," and realises, "I could see their faces. And I could see where we were." Remarkably, they live to tell the story - and McAllester cleverly uses it as a taking off point for the real focus of his book, the plight of the Iraqi people.With riveting prose he makes readers privy to risky journalistic investigations, covering covert political manoeuvring, the inner workings of the regime and the real opinions of the too-long silenced Iraqi people. The brutal punishments, tortures, senseless violence and mass graveyards of Saddam's regime are objectively detailed, but so too are the less well-known stories of, for example, Iraq's seriously charming first English language boy-band, "Unknown to No-One," who take considerable risks to be pop-stars in the style of the west. Out of all this Abu-Graib, the most feared prison in Saddam's Iraq, emerges as a powerful metaphor for the entire country under Saddam's rule, in which people's civil liberties were quashed and fear was a constant. But writing from the inside, the author also finds within the culture moments of great beauty. That the prison itself was, the author discovers, actually built by an American company is tellingly ironic. Already an award-winning journalist, McAllester is also a great storyteller. No matter what your opinion about the justification for the war, the hair-raising descriptions of prison politics, missiles sailing overhead and the new-found freedoms evolving out of still-continuing chaos, are brilliantly astute. Anyone interested in Iraq will find this book intelligent and sensitively written: most definitely a page-turner.

Best Iraq book out

Great book shows amazing insight into the events in Saddam's Iraq and the hell its people have been through. You are taken into their lives and their traumas become real. The author's own story of imprisonment is gripping and the account is so personal you share his fears and inner thoughts. I really learned a lot about the tyrant we have heard so much about, and the way he has wrecked Iraq and it's people. Tense and disturbing but enlightening and moving. If you buy one book on Iraq it should be this one.