Word: mosul
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...rounds. He's met the uniforms from the county sheriff's office, hovered near the the railroad company's booth, peered at the slightly mangy Aflac duck. Nothing offered at this recent job fair resembles his previous occupation, driving and manning guns on a Stryker armored vehicle in Mosul, Iraq. No matter: what he needs is a paycheck with benefits, his first full-time job since separating from the Army in April 2006. He's 25. He's living with his toddler son and pregnant wife in her parents' house. He's getting way too friendly with his Xbox...
...something that seemed impenetrable and make such elegant sense of it that readers wonder why they never saw order in all that chaos before. Malcolm Gladwell did it for snap decision making. Jared Diamond did it for the rise of civilizations. Now Lynne O'Donnell, with High Tea in Mosul, does it for sniper fire and kidnapping threats. Four years into the war in Iraq, she captures with stark simplicity what it's like to live with ceaseless fear and violence...
High Tea in Mosul follows two Englishwomen, longtime friends Pauline (a pseudonym) and Margaret (her real name), who married Iraqi students they met in England and moved in the 1970s to the ancient northern Iraqi city of Mosul. In 2003 they met the author - an Australian then covering the war for the Irish Times - shortly after coalition troops freed the city. O'Donnell's book is a brief, devastating account of how these women's lives change over three increasingly grim decades in their adopted country...
...great strength of High Tea in Mosul is to reveal that flesh-and-blood world behind the impersonal blur of headlines. O'Donnell, keenly aware of the quotidian reality of life in Iraq, cautions against "knee-jerk anti-Americanism," remarking: "It doesn't do Iraqis any favors. The focus should be on making Iraq a place Iraqis want to live." Today, Pauline and Margaret have both left Mosul. Their stories - of hastily packed suitcases thrown in cars at dawn - are a sad reminder of just how unlivable their former home has become...
...bone," he said, "even when they are being friendly to you." Non-Kurdish Iraqis, for their part, resent being treated as second-class citizens in Kurdish Iraq. "Why do I need permission to live in my own country?" said Walaa Matti, an Assyrian Christian who fled his home in Mosul and works in the business center of a hotel in Arbil. "I'm Iraqi, and this is my country, but I feel like a stranger...