History Alive!:engaging All Learners... Book

One of the most difficult aspects of writing history books must be deciding how much detail to include. If the author doesn't go into enough depth, readers can be deprived of substantive information. If the author includes too much, the reading can become burdensome. Charles Tripp's A History of Iraq falls more into the latter camp. While it provides many important details, such as the names and motivations of many Iraqi leaders, the tenets of the Baathist Party, and UN resolutions aimed at curbing human rights abuses and ending suspected weapons programs, it tends to get bogged down in excessive amounts of specifics. Every tribe and faction (and there are legions of them), no matter how briefly they were a part of Iraqi politics, get a place in this book.

Aside from the fact that this is extremely hard to follow in many instances, there are two other problems I had with it. The first is that for all the details described, there are still many terms, issues, and processes left unexplained. For example, after describing the first few Iraqi kings beginning in the 1920s, the author turns his focus to regents, presidents, prime ministers, and other high ranking officials. It was never clear to me what the actual role of these positions was, as if the author assumed readers would already know these things.

The second problem was that the entire focus was on the elites in the government. There were a few mentions of regular citizens here and there, but even these were typically just to remind readers that the lower classes were continually neglected and living in poor conditions throughout the last few hundred years. No real information is provided as to their daily lives.

As for the scope of the book, it spends a little time discussing the three provinces—Baghdad, Mosul, and Basra—when they were ruled by the Ottoman Empire beginning in the early eighteenth century. It moves on to the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, which forced the sultan to reinstate the Ottoman Constitution; spends quite a bit of time with the British occupation, which began in 1914 and lasted unofficially for decades afterwards; and goes up through Saddam Hussein's reign, which began in the 1970s (and was still going on when the book was published).

It also discusses the central recurring themes of Iraq: the division many Shia felt between allegiance to their Arab country and their Persian religious leaders, the many feuds over oil revenue, the system of patrimony that kept ruling families in power, the often violently coercive tactics used, and, of course, "the long-unanswered question of the identity of Iraq, as a potential nation-state or as an administrative part of a larger Arab nation."