"In the Belly of the Green Bird" by Nir Rosen

In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq
by Nir Rosen

http://www.amazon.com/Belly-Green-Bird-Triumph-Martyrs/dp/0743277031/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-2352339-5517608?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1181506633&sr=1-1

I’ve been a definite fan of Nir Rosen’s reporting from Iraq for several years now. Depending on your point of view, the guy either has a reckless disregard for his own life or nerves of steel. I’d vote for a bit of both as I think he would probably agree, having been the only western reporter getting the story from inside Falluja before the Americans flattened the town in late 2004 (a time when other westerners and lots of Iraqis were getting beheaded and tortured in the town). All the more incredible given that Nir is actually Israeli by birth, a fact which on its own you’d think would have been enough to get him killed anywhere he went in today’s Iraq. Credit his apparently excellent spoken Iraqi Arabic and his complete disavowal of Zionism for giving him the ability to get around and be trusted despite a background which typically would have excluded him from the places he’s been and reported well from.

So, given the guy’s amazing reporting, command of Arabic, wide-ranging travels in Iraq off of the typical western reporter’s beat, etc., I had high hopes for his book. Unfortunately, as with “Against the Gods”, I have to give it a mixed review and for somewhat similar reasons. First off, while Nir is a great reporter, he’s not an author and as with Bernstein it shows in a book that comes off as incoherent in aggregate and feeling much more like a series of anecdotes than a comprehensive whole. I’m not quite sure if the book was meant to be a history, a sort of memoir, a journalist’s travelogue, or some mixture. It just felt disjointed.

Also, as with “Against the Gods”, Nir’s writing seems quite lacking in an understanding of the broader historical context. For Bernstein, this meant a heavy western-centric focus on the notion of risk management, for Rosen it means the repetition of a lot of clichés about ‘eternal’ conflicts and how things have supposedly always been this way, how “Sunnis” have always been in charge and “Shia” always persecuted and lots of other broad-brush explanations for what is fueling the conflict in Iraq. Not that it’s hard to see why Nir might slip into this mode. I at least give him the credit for being on the ground where people speaking in raw, rough words and actions make it feel like the simple explanations have some merit. I contrast that with your standard Green Zone-based western reporter who hears some ignorant US military or State Department official parroting ignorant senior officials about Sunnis and Shiites and Kurds, and then just copies down the US government press releases verbatim calling it reporting. At least Nir was falling victim to the same mentality that most Iraqis were being slowly dragged into as opposed to parroting clueless USG officials (of course there is a link, US officials having basically unleashed the sectarian genie, but from a micro perspective of individual reporters that’s less the issue). Another reason Nir may have fallen into the trap is that at least from what is in the book, it appears he did spend most of his time with the more extreme elements. That is entirely appropriate on one level: it is the angry and violent men that rule Iraq today and who make things happen and they tend to have the most extreme view of things.

Still, also as with “Against the Gods”, the book remains a valuable read. It is at least a compilation of lots of anecdotes and stories from on the ground in Iraq. Nir attended many clerics sermons and sat down with lots of Mujahideen, tribal sheiks, clerics, US foot soldiers, and others. Even if I don’t necessarily trust his explanations and conclusions, the raw material he has gathered here offers a view of the war that few others are able to offer. Some have suggested this book is a critical "Iraqi viewpoint" companion piece to well-written books on the American experience in Iraq. I wish I could give that endorsement, but I can't quite. I can still recommend it though as attempting to be that and offering a lot of unique material, but it remains to raw and disjointed to really be "essential" reading.

Rosen has some maturing to do as a writer and as an analyst if he wants to move beyond (his excellent) magazine pieces, but at least he does have the raw material. I hope he grows in the right ways, because he could produce some very good material. Unfortunately, this book isn't there yet.

"Against the Gods" by Peter L. Bernstein

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk

by Peter L. Bernstein

http://www.amazon.com/Against-Gods-Remarkable-Story-Risk/dp/0471295639/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-2352339-5517608?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1181506599&sr=8-1

This book was a bestseller following it’s release in the 90s and one I’ve been meaning to read for sometime. Basically it purports to be a history of the concepts of risk and risk management, veering more and more over the course of the book towards financial risk management (though touching on health and other fields as it goes along). Author Bernstein has received all sorts of critical acclaim and so I came into this with high hopes. But, I have to give the book a mixed review.

Yes, Bernstein is the only one I know to have attempted to tackle this topic and it is a daunting one with its mixture of mathematics, personalities, and history. However, Bernstein is not a historian and it shows. Rather than feeling like a unified work with a solid thesis (theses) and a well-structured narrative, it comes across as a series of almost random anecdotal stories. I didn’t walk away feeling that I had a strong sense of how these concepts had truly evolved from one stage to another to finally bring us to the state of risk management today. Or maybe I should say, I walk away with only vague notions of how that occurred.

The other major criticism is Bernstein’s western-centric approach. He pays brief homage in the beginning to forebears of concepts of risk in other civilizations (Arabs, Indians, Chinese, Greeks, etc.) but ultimately dismisses them and their entire civilizations as having failed to grasp the key concepts. Now, not being a historian of risk, he may well be right, he may well be wrong. But I for one can’t help but think that given the heights other civilizations and their far-flung economies have reached in the past, that they may well have had a far more sophisticated understanding of risk management than Bernstein gives them credit for. I find the hypothesis that they had knowledge which was lost a far more plausible notion than Bernstein’s basic and poorly supported thesis that they simply never figured the basics out. That impression is made all the more powerful by the way Bernstein uses some pretty old-fashioned (and quite frankly erroneous in my view) notions about religious dogma and overwhelming belief in fate in various cultures as the root fault behind other civilizations’ supposed failures to achieve mastery of risk.

Ok, but those faults aside, it is still a book worth reading. If those problems are understood and kept in mind as one reads, the book still remains the only decent attempt I have ever heard of to write a history of how risk management as we know it today developed. I may walk away with mostly just anecdotes from it, but I at least have a whole lot of useful anecdotes I didn’t before!