Imperial Life in the Emerald City
by Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Vintage, HK$147
Bourne Ultimatum director Paul Greengrass is filming this year's winner of the GBP30,000 (HK$477,000) non-fiction Samuel Johnson Prize, Imperial Life in the Emerald City. Written by The Washington Post's former bureau chief in Baghdad, it captures the staggering incompetence of the US administration in post-invasion Iraq under viceroy Paul Bremer, where Republican party connections counted more than expertise. Even today there are economic officials in the secure 'Green Zone' still working out how to manoeuvre Iraq into the World Trade Organisation as the country teeters on the brink of civil war between the Sunnis and Shiites. Rajiv Chandrasekaran's book has been hailed as 'a minor masterpiece' and likened to a non-fiction version of Catch-22 and M*A*S*H. Chair of the Samuel Johnson judges, Baroness Kennedy, says it best: 'Imperial Life in the Emerald City is up there with the greatest reportage of the last 50 years - as fine as John Hersey's Hiroshima and Capote's In Cold Blood. The writing is cool, exact and never overstated, and in many places very humorous as the jaw-dropping idiocy of the American action is revealed.'
