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    I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story
    I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story
    I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story
    Ebook319 pages5 hours

    I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story

    By Michael Hastings

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    The “wrenching” (Rachel Maddow, The Rachel Maddow Show) first book by acclaimed journalist Michael Hastings (1980-2013), whose unflinching Rolling Stone article “Runaway General” ended the military career of General Stanley A. McChrystal.

    At age twenty-five, Michael Hastings arrived in Baghdad to cover the war in Iraq for Newsweek. He had at his disposal a little Hemingway romanticism and all the apparatus of a twenty-first-century reporter -- cell phones, high-speed Internet access, digital video cameras, fixers, drivers, guards, translators. In startling detail, he describes the chaos, the violence, the never-ending threats of bomb and mortar attacks, the front lines that can be a half mile from the Green Zone, that can be anywhere. This is a new kind of war: private security companies follow their own rules or lack thereof; soldiers in combat get instant messages from their girlfriends and families; members of the Louisiana National Guard watch Katrina's decimation of their city on a TV in the barracks.

    Back in New York, Hastings had fallen in love with Andi Parhamovich, a young idealist who worked for Air America. A year into their courtship, Andi followed Michael to Iraq, taking a job with the National Democratic Institute. Their war-zone romance is another window into life in Baghdad. They call each other pet names; they make plans for the future; they fight, usually because each is fearful for the other's safety; and they try to figure out how to get together, when it means putting bodyguards and drivers in jeopardy.Then Andi goes on a dangerous mission for her new employer -- a meeting at the Iraqi Islamic Party headquarters that ends in catastrophe.

    Searing, unflinching, and revelatory, I Lost My Love in Baghdad is both a raw, brave, brilliantly observed account of the war and a heartbreaking story of one life lost to it.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateApr 8, 2008
    ISBN9781416561163
    Author

    Michael Hastings

    Michael Hastings (1980-2013) was a contributing editor to Rolling Stone and a reporter for Buzzfeed. In 2008, he covered the US presidential election for Newsweek. His work appeared in GQ, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Slate, Salon, Foreign Policy, The Daily Beast, and a number of other publications. In 2011, he was awarded the George Polk Award for magazine reporting for his story in Rolling Stone, “The Runaway General.” He is the author of I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story (Scribner, 2008) and The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan (Blue Rider, 2012).

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    • 5/5
      Even before he had made waves with "The Runaway General", his article for Rolling Stone about General Stanley McChrystal which led to the supreme U.S. commander in Afghanistan being removed from his post, journalist Michael Hastings had already courted controversy with this memoir. It chronicles his tragic relationship with Andi Parhamovich, a young woman who he met just a few months before he took up an assignment for Newsweek reporting from Iraq. They continued a long distance relationship, with short interludes together whenever Hastings returned to the States for leave. Eventually Andi decided to apply for a job with an U.S. NGO operating in Baghdad in order to both further her own idealistic ambitions to help the people of Iraq, and be closer to her boyfriend. A decision that would eventually have fatal consequences.Hastings describes both his deepening relationship with Andi, which eventually leads to talk of marriage and shopping expeditions to pick out the right engagement ring, alongside his life as a reporter in a war zone, which particularly after the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samaraa in early 2006 descends into all out civil war. He describes both aspects of his life in vivid detail. The tale is a gripping one even though the end is a forgone conclusion. When the moment arrives, Hastings recounts in shocking detail what happens when Andi goes on a trip in to a hostile area as part of her job and is ambushed by an insurgent group.Some reviewers have criticised the book as a cynical attempt to cash in on Andi's death. But Hastings writes with a honesty so brutal that one suspects that under the lucid, unadorned prose he is grappling with a deep sense of guilt. Some of the episodes with Andi he describes are ones in which he was impatient, unfair or hurtful and he never tries to offer rationalisations or apologies for these but presents them unadorned and unvarnished for the reader. A reviewer once described his tell-all account of McChrystal and his coterie in Afghanistan as a a burning of the bridge which gave him inside access to the 'story' in the military "with everyone, including him, on it." Here he seems to have turned the harsh spotlight on himself with the same fearlessness.Insightful, engaging and deeply moving.
    • 3/5
      Interesting read about embedded journalists... not such a great love story. I don't doubt that they loved each other, it's just that the author did much better at describing his job rather than the romance, and that was ironic as that seemed to be the basis for most of the couple's immature fights. WHY WAS SHE WITH HIM?
    • 4/5
      Two months before being dispatched to Iraq, reporter Michael Hastings falls in love with Andi Pahramovich, a feisty blonde with a burning passion to make the world a better place. The couple spends a year apart, and then Andi -- perhaps for her own reasons or perhaps just to be with Michael -- takes a job in Baghdad, where she is killed by terrorists. I Lost My Love in Baghdad is Hastings' "last love letter to Andi." The book tells two parallel stories: Hastings' experiences as a reporter in Baghdad and the couple's unsteady long-distance relationship. As many reviewers have pointed out, Hastings writes about war better than he writes about love. He lived in Iraq during Baghdad's most violent period, and his writing exposes intriguing (and distrubing) hidden details of the American occupation. This day-in-the-life of Iraq perspective is not available through standard newspaper articles, and that alone makes the book worth reading. Although Hastings writes about Iraq vividly and strongly, he often falls into cliches when describing his relationship with Andi. Some reviewers have suggested this is because he wants to write a book about Iraq more than he wants to write a book about his relationship, but I never got that impression. Years of dispassionate hard news reporting are probably not ideal preparation for writing a heartfelt autobiographical story, so it's not surprising that his writing occasionally lags. This was a minor glitch though, and one that I barely noticed. Real emotion shines through the cliches, and I left the book feeling that I had read a real, human and raw story.

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    I Lost My Love in Baghdad - Michael Hastings

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