It's not the best-written book in the world; it reads as though it were translated, and not translated very well. There's also a cultural approach that doesn't come across well in the whole structure of the book: it's very elliptical, meaning that Sada starts on a subject, wanders off to others further out and then finally loops back around to where he started.

The value herein are the hidden gems of what Sada saw about Saddam and Iraq up close and personal, or what he knows from people he's met. Those are truly game-changers and shed a lot of light on how horrific Saddam really was, and an equal amount of light on how badly Bush lost the PR war. ( )