'Naked in Baghdad' offers perspective on war

Even though many of the other journalists seemed to be fleeing or deported, National Public Radio correspondent Anne Garrels captured the Iraq war. Garrels was the only U.S. broadcast journalist to stay in Baghdad until American military forces came to the city, and her book "Naked in Baghdad" is valuable even for people completely uninvolved with the media. \nGarrels offers a first-person account of the trials she faced while surviving in a country under siege. \nShe wrote the book about a month after her return from Iraq and titled it "Naked in Baghdad" because she broadcast some of her stories naked so she could garner extra time to hide illegal equipment in case there was a security sweep.\n"I figured that if I answered the door naked, I'd get a few minutes to shut the door, hide the phone, throw on a dress that I had laid out ready for such an event and then let them in," Garrels said in an interview on the NPR Web site, www.npr.org. "Those people who were found with illegal phones were either expelled or, during the war, four were detained for eight days in solitary confinement, and we did not know their whereabouts until they suddenly appeared safe and sound in Jordan."\nGarrels' book gives an account of life under the Saddam Hussein regime and how it affected the Iraqi people. She provides context and sheds light on a complicated situation, which often has been treated simplistically in daily news coverage. The sincere and honest tone of the book is undoubtedly a major reason for her respected status as a journalist.\nGarrels' descriptions of her life during those days are clear and provoke the reader to continue turning the pages even when the book is written in snippets and vignettes, similar to a journal. But the extremity of her time in Iraq and the flair of her language holds interest without glorification or overdramatization. Her style comes off straight forward and devoid of sugar coating while revealing an overwhelming hope for the future and a complexity that should leave readers, no matter what their political persuasion or opinions of the war, thinking long after they have put the book down.