Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone

Finalist for the National Book AwardThis is the startling portrait of an Oz-like place where a vital aspect of our government’s folly in Iraq played out.

The Washington Post’s former Baghdad bureau chief, Raviv Chandrasekaran, takes us with him into the Zone, into a bubble, cut off from wartime realities, where the task of reconstructing a devastated nation competed with the distractions of a Little America—-a half-dozen bars stocked with cold beer, a disco where women showed up …