Rating: 
Summary: Excellent account of war-reporting's vagaries
Review: In some ways, Anne Garrels had a extraordinary advantage over print and television reporters who covered the Iraq war last spring. She had no cameras, no tell-tale articles that could be hunted on the Internet by suspicious secret police, no bulky notebooks to mark her as a reporter in a crowd. Only a tape recorder the size of a cigarette pack ... and the sounds of war. She traveled lightly and discreetly, just under the radar of the gatekeepers. Now, "Naked in Baghdad" chronicles Garrels's Iraq assignments between October 2002 and she left after the war in April 2003 -- from under-the-table visa negotiations, to swimming in a stagnating hotel pool to work off stress, to explaining the haunted life of normal Iraqis to normal Americans nine hours behind her. "Naked" is intimate, authentic and blunt, without much literary decoration. It's a simple account that offers a real glimpse inside a foreign reporter's life -- and of the grander canvas upon which world events are being painted. Unlike many of the wet-eared young correspondents dispatched to Iraq, Garrels is a hardened veteran, earning her stripes covering conflicts in the West Bank, Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. Time zones, border crossings, badge-heavy bureaucrats, language barriers, blood and death are her office furniture. Garrels's account is scrupulously impartial. She openly discusses her skepticism about a war based on suspicions about weapons of mass destruction, but bluntly explains Saddam's intolerable degradations. Garrels is, as one might hope, ultimately fair and balanced. Her goal is to capture the nuances and the ripple-effects of war among people who are directly splashed by it -- and such people rarely dictate the spin of news. "Naked in Baghdad" certainly adds the most intimate war-reporting in a conflict that changed many of the rules for journalists.
Rating:
Summary: This is no damsel in distress
Review: In this day and age it is hard not to become obsessed with following the news but it is easy to forget that what you read in the newspaper is only half the story. NPR reporter Anne Garrels tells the account of what goes on behind the news as she reports from Baghdad leading up to and during the war.
I was also happy to find that Garrels steers clear of the usual journalistic self aggrandizement in writing this incredible compelling book. Weaving together her own daily life in Iraq, the pressures of dealing with the madness of Saddam's bureaucracy and her encounters with regular people, she opens up a whole different world to her readers. This has the effect of humanizing the Iraquies, showing them as neither enemy nor victim as they are so often portrayed to suit the purposes of others but rather showing them as they are. It is also refreshing to read how Garrels also breaks down the traditional barrier between the reporter and the public-showing how Garrels herself is like so many of us in being of two minds regarding the war and its consequences.
This thoughtful and powerful account of reporting from the front line should not be missed!
Rating:
Summary: Great writing, great reporting!
Review: Naked in Baghdad is a very good take on the war there, and Anne Garrels has contributed a very important document to the history of this war. By the way, I grew up in Longmeadow, Massachusetts with Miss Garrels, she was my next door neighbor, a skinny little girl in pigtails, and Iwas a skinny little boy with a crewcut (now bald) and I have not seen her since I was 18 and went off to college. The Garrels' backyard merged with Blooms' backyard, and I knew her in elementary school and junior high days. I have lost touch with her since 1967 and I didn't even know she grew up to be this great international reporter for ABC and now NPR. I remembered the name, however, from childhood and when i wrote to NPR, they said, yes, Ms Garrels comes from Longmeadow. So she is MY Anne Garrels, boyhood neighbor. Now she belongs to the world. COol. keep writing, Miss Garrels. Hope we meet again someday. Do you remember skinny little Danny Bloom? I am an international reporter now, too, but not half as good as you! Different beat, too.
Rating:
Summary: A gifted journalist looks at wartime Baghdad
Review: One sentence illuminates the spirit of Anne Garrels' "Naked in Baghdad": ". . . I am fascinated by how people survive, and how the process of war affects the attitudes of all sides involved, and how they pull out of it." Thus, Garrels portrays the attitudes of Iraqis she encounters in Baghdad before, during, and after the entry of American armed forces into that city. For example, Garrels' informants react to the omnipresent threat of catastropic violence. They react to the early and -- it turned out -- wildly optimistic reports of heroic resistance by the Iraqi army (they reacted with pride, even though they might have secretly despised Saddam Hussein). They react to the euphoric surprise of ugraded weaponry employed by the Americans and their allies, as compared to the 1991 war, because it proved more precise and therefor less disruptive of their lives. They react to the rapid deployment of American troops to protect the Oil Ministry building, in contrast to the more leisurely deployment around national treasures such as the antiquities museum, or even hospitals, which were quickly looted. Rightly or wrongly, this latter fact confirmed the belief in the streets of Baghdad that America fought this war for oil. Garrel's renderings of the persons she encounters are compassionate and insightful. Her affection for her guide and all-around enabler, Amer, is palpable. In this sense, "Naked in Baghdad" is reminiscent of Freya Stark's "The Southern Gates of Arabia", based on Stark's 1934 journey through Hadhmaraut. Garrels brings some depth to her reporting from Baghdad under Saddam Hussein. She has reported from the Soviet Union, and she finds parallels between the atmosphere of the Soviet Union and that of Hussein's Iraq. Suffice it to say one does not grow fonder of totalitarian regimes by reading the account of one who has had close contact with them. Several books exist that follow American troops into Baghdad. In contrast, in "Naked in Baghdad" one vicariously waits for the invasion with the people of Baghdad. This book is a worthwhile glimpse into the Iraqi war and the fall of Hussein as perceived by the Iraqi people, filtered through the adroit reporting of an astute Western observer.
Rating: 
Summary: Fearless
Review: Our family has been following Garrels' career since she was in Moscow with ABC. She is one of the best reporters anywhere. Her reports from Baghdad during the war were remarkable. She is fearless. This short book makes me think that Garrels is not the sort of person who can patiently sit at home writing something longer than a dispatch from the front. I enjoyed reading about what happened "behind the mike," but the narrative seemed forced. The e-mails from her husband seemed almost gimmicky, as if her editor was looking for a way to point up how brave Garrels was, without having her tell you herself. After listening to those reports from Baghdad, we don't need to be told she's brave. We know. Although she tells us in the book that she has retired from reporting from war zones, I wouldn't be surprised to hear her reporting from the next hot spot, calmly, and getting the stories that everyone else missed.
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Summary: people of Iraq, not politics of America
Review: The best thing that I found about this book is how the focus was NOT on the politics of the war in Iraq. Anne Garrels, thankfully, didn't spend too much time analyzing President Bush's choices in starting the war, like so many other books have done. Instead, she chose to talk about the people of Iraq, and focus on the humane aspects of her stay in Baghdad. Although she covered much of the daily corruption in Iraq, she didn't choose to comment on it, and the memorable parts of the book are when she talks to Iraqi civilians, those who choose to speak out or those who stay silent. Although conservatives might decry it as liberal, this book shows one of the most important aspects of the war that often goes unnoticed - the effect on the people of Iraq.
Rating: 
Summary: Who do you trust? Who do you believe? Who knows?
Review: This brief (222 pages) diary covers October 2002 through April 2003, reported by National Public Radio's Anne Garrels, interspersed with e-mails from her husband, who sent updates on her whereabouts and actions to her friends around the world. Most of the action takes place in Baghdad. The run-up to the March war has Garrels struggling (without much success) to find reliable information and trusted assistants. Language is a huge barrier. Cultural differences are almost as big a barrier. Intrigue and torture by the government makes conclusions almost as unreliable as the raw data. Who can you believe? Did the interpreter interpret the story accurately? How filtered and restricted is her access to sources? Is the source who he says he is? After about four months of uncertainty, the war is over faster than anyone expected. After some short-term Baghdad belief that the Iraqis will hold, their defense folds like a shabby card table. The resulting chaos should not be surprising. The messages she hears and sees are often unclear, inconsistent and contradictory: Iraqis love Saddam, Iraqis hate Saddam; Americans are welcomed, Americans are despised; American bombs hit civilians, Iraqi defenses hit their own civilians; a wounded man is a civilian, the doctor says he is an officer lying to the reporter. It is impossible to decipher the truth. Even with all this technology, the fog of war is compounded to the bitter end by the cruel, petty banality of the Hussein regime. Straightforward stories get reversed and revised. Remember the idiotic information minister claiming that the Americans were not occupying the airport? Some lies become part of the history of the war. Late in her story, Garrels reports on the now debunked story of the looting of the national museum. She notes other reporters and networks who made significant compromises to stay in country; some of these compromises kept them there but made the stories of questionable veracity and ethics. This collection of memories is more about reporters, reporting and technology than politics and war. Journalism under these conditions is more than challenging. Reporters have to bribe, lie and cajole; it is easy to imagine (oaky, let's just assume) that those whose stories are being told are doing much of the same. Garrels is assisted by a quasi-stringer, her minder/interpreter/driver who, at times, is her eyes and front-line reporter. Like the memorable film on Cambodia, "The killing fields", the American reporter is able to do her work primarily because of and through the work of a 'trusted' local who, only later do we find, is not at all what he claimed to be. And the American moves on to another task. Garrels has contempt for some reporters (e.g., Dan Rather, Geraldo Rivera, an anonymous network bimbette in a tight t-shirt, French journalists who use their feminine guile to orally seduce a minister), general respect for one (John Burns), and no use for those who arrive late to the scene. She is a technical whiz, keeping her cell phone, satellite connection and tape recorder running on car batteries and tape. Garrels was certainly brave, fascinated by the war, yet at times she seems incredibly optimistic about her rights or expectations as a foreogn journalist, regularly surprised or just unhappy at how poorly she is treated, sexually assaulted, expected to pay bribes. She acts like she should have immunity from nervous young soldiers and misplaced missiles. This book will revive many already dormant memories about a cruel dictatorship and a brief, formal war followed by a chaotic, dragged out denouement.
Rating:
Summary: Listen to the silences...
Review: This is a well-written, often fascinating account of life in Baghdad under Saddam while waiting for the bombs to fall. It's fun to hear some of the events from war-time Baghdad told from the receiving end. That said, all she ever reported was local color. What was the purpose in risking her life, except for her own ego and adrenalin rush? This is a nice little book, but there's not much new or relevant here about the Iraqi situation.
Rating: 
Summary: terrible
Review: This is an atrocious account of the war. Nothing here is to be beleived. The women, the author, was invovled in some sort of relationship with an official of the regime and she was totally taken in by Saddams propoganda. THis is a book full of anti-american propoganda. Typical of NPR, an awful book, probably Peter Arnett would like it.
Rating:
Summary: Journalism at War
Review: Though Garrels was one of just a handful of American journalists to stay in Baghdad during the run-up to war, the political and military machinations going on around her are just one element of the book. The meat of the book is devoted to her personal relationships with her fellow journalists, minders, drivers, and the myraid Iraqi officials who spent the regime's final days collecting bribe money. As an inside look into the harrowing life of a war correspondant, the book is brilliant, filled with menacing bad guys and explosions that are way too close for comfort. But Garrels is at her absolute best as she delves into the backroom politics of the world of the macho foreign correspondant. She revels in the fact that American television left Baghdad before the war, leaving only an old school contingent of print reporters to cover the invasion from the capital. She pulls no puches as she berates CNN's arrogance and Geraldo Rivera's foolishness. Her demand is for professionalism over sensationalism.
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