I didn't expect it to be an easy read, very arrhythmic, unsettling and conflicting. All in all a bit hard to follow, with an anti-American flavor. Didn't like it, but always glad to read a different perspective than my own. ( )

Pepe Escobar shows us some of his native Rio de Janerio as some US troops do carnaval there. He also does them in Irak and other parts. He touches on many sins of the soldiers, the hired mercinaries and workers--I know all this is going on, but somehow did not get into the book for insights, or more information. Maybe I can not be a fair reviewer.

Although this is a very short book, and one that I expected would resonate fiercely with my own political outrage, I found it almost unreadable in several earnests attempts. The prose is often baroque and always elliptical, and it is sometimes very difficult to wrest the sense from the short narratives. Rarely have I been so frustrated in my attempts at progress through a book.

An advance copy from LibraryThing's Early Review program, this is an account of life in Baghdad during the U.S. occupation and the Surge. Escobar paints a harsh picture of conditions there, and the purported agenda of the U.S. toward the Gulf Region. Trouble is, it's hard to disagree with Escobar; it really does seem to me like Cheney & company had designs on the oil wealth of Iraq and Iran from the beginning. In other words, if the chief product of the region had been kumquats, we wouldn't be there. That said, this is a fairly rambling account that often seems to spin off into fairly irrelevant sidebars. ( )