What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles

By Bush Chronicles and Eliot Weinberger

Book Overview

Essayist Eliot Weinberger sets his sights on the Bush team with brilliant, thought-provoking, funny consequences.

Written for publication in magazines abroad, translated into sixteen languages, and collected here for the first time, Eliot Weinberger's chronicles of the Bush era range from first-person journalism to political analysis to a kind of documentary prose poetry. The book begins with the inauguration of George W. Bush in January 200land an eerie prediction of the invasion of Iraqand picks up on September 12, with an account of downtown Manhattan, where Weinberger lives, on the "day after." With wit and anger, and sometimes startling prescience, What Happened Here takes us through the first term of the "Bush junta" the deep history of the neoconservative "sleeper cell," the invention of the War on Terror, the real wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the often bizarre behavior of the Republican Party. For twenty-five years, Eliot Weinberger has been taking the essay form into unexplored territory. In What Happened Here, truth proves stranger than poetry.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811216381
• ISBN13: 9780811216388
• Release Date: January 1
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 184 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.1" x 7.1"

Customer Reviews

Emotional and Gut Wrenching

As the publisher of The Iraq War Blog, An Iraqi Family's Inside View of the First Year of the Occupation, I was absolutely amazed at the accuracy of Mr. Weinberger's perceptions of the Bush administration, it's cabal of evildoers, and the true conditions surrounding the war in Iraq. I am currently working on a book on the Bush administration and in the past three years, I have read nearly 200 books, and countless magazine articles and stories, and I must say, with all due apologies to other authors, that What Happened Here is the best book I have read in this genre. The simplicity and emotion with which Mr. Weinberger has detailed his observations are what make this book what it is: a great piece of literature that must be read by everyone, everywhere.