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Narrated by both Henry Cockburn and his father Patrick, this is the extraordinary story of the eight years since Henry's descent into schizophrenia- years he has spent almost entirely in hospitals- and his family's struggle to help him recover.
It is very easy to get polio. Patrick Cockburn was six when he woke up one day in the summer of 1956 with a headache and a sore throat. His parents, Claud and Patricia Cockburn, had recently returned to Ireland, to their house in East Cork, careless of the fact that a polio epidemic had broken out in Cork City. He caught the disease and was taken to the fever hospital. The virus attacks the nerves of the brain and the spinal cord leading to paralysis of the muscles. Patrick could no longer walk. The Broken Boy is at once a memoir of Patrick Cockburn's own experience of polio, a portrait of his parents, both prominent radicals, and the story of the Cork epidemic, the last great polio epidemic in the world.
In this urgent and timely book, Patrick Cockburn writes the first draft of the history of the current crisis in the Middle East. Here he charts the period from the recapture of Mosul in 2017 to Turkey's attack on Kurdish territory in November 2019, and recounts the new phase in the wars of disintegration that have plagued the region, leading to the assassination of Iranian General Sulemani. Cockburn offers panoramic on-the-ground analysis as well as a lifetime's study of the region. As author of The Rise of Islamic State, and the Age of Jihad, he has proved to be leading, critical commentator of US intervention and the chaos it has wrecked/ And here he shows how, since Trump entered the Whit...
Though capable of staging spectacular attacks like 9/11, jihadist organizations were not a significant force on the ground when they first became notorious in the shape of al-Qa'ida at the turn of century. //Today, that's changed. Exploiting the missteps of the West's wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, as well as its misjudgments in relation to Syria and the uprisings of the Arab Spring, jihadist organizations, of which ISIS is the most important, are swiftly expanding. They now control a geographical territory greater in size than Britain or Michigan, stretching from the Sunni heartlands in the north and west of Iraq through a broad swath of north-east Syria. On the back of their capture ...
In February 2003, Patrick Cockburn secretly crossed the Tigris river from Syria into Iraq just before the US/British invasion, and has covered the war ever since. In The Occupation, he provides a vivid and disturbing picture of a country in turmoil, and the dangers and privations endured by its people. The Occupation explores the mosaic of communities in Iraq, the US and Britain's failure to understand the country they were invading and how this led to fatal mistakes. Cockburn, who has been visiting Iraq since 1978, describes the disintegration of the country under the occupation. Travelling throughout Iraq, from the Kurdish north, to Baghdad, Falluja and Basra, he records the response of th...
An expose of the internal feuds in the CIA that doomed the secret operations to bring down Saddam Hussein. The authors are investigative journalists who covered the story from inside Iraq. They offer insights into the psyche of Saddam and his family, bodyguards and extended tribal family, as well as his weapons of mass destruction.
.The idea of direct invasion is the greatest threat to Saddam. It avoids the problems of securing local allies, inside and outside Iraq, which bedevil any indirect approach to get rid of him. But it has one immense disadvantage from the US point of view . if the US invades Iraq to install its own government it will be taking direct physical control of an area containing more than half the world.s oil reserves. It will look like the founding of a new American empire based on physical force and will be deeply resented . It would outrage the Arabs at a moment when the Israel-Palestine conflict is in a particularly bloody phase. America could find that it has overplayed its hand, just as Saddam ...
This is the first book about Muqtada al Sadr, the most important political figure in post-occupation Iraq. Muqtada has become the kingmaker of Iraq and a force that is indispensable to any Iraqi government: the Mehdi Army, his devoted militia, now rules half of Baghdad. Far from being the 'firebrand cleric' portrayed in the western media, he is an astute and experienced politician who struggles to lead an anarchic mass movement that he only half controls. In a compelling narrative, award-winning war correspondent Patrick Cockburn charts the rise of Muqtada, and has written an essential book for our understanding of Iraq's future. Cockburn has reported from Iraq since 1977, often at great personal risk, and Muqtada al Sadr and the Fall of Iraq combines first hand accounts of his investigations with vivid and dismaying descriptions of the civil war that is tearing the country apart.
An unprecedented analysis of the crucial but underexplored roles the United States and other nations have played in shaping Syria’s ongoing civil war “One of the best informed and non-partisan accounts of the Syrian tragedy yet published.”—Patrick Cockburn, Independent Syria’s brutal, long-lasting civil war is widely viewed as a domestic contest that began in 2011 and only later drew foreign nations into the fray. But in this book Christopher Phillips shows the crucial roles that were played by the United States, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar in Syria’s war right from the start. Phillips untangles the international influences on the tragic conflict and illuminates the West’s strategy against ISIS, the decline of U.S. power in the region, and much more. Originally published in 2016, the book has been updated with two new chapters.