Bookworld Saturday

It's not a great time, mid-semester, to be taking on extracurricular reading, but here's a new non-fiction offering from ABC foreign correspondent Martha Raddatz that promises to be instructive, in terms of the point at which this war began spinning out of control. Here's a sneak peek from the WaPo Bookworld magazine:

"The chief White House correspondent for ABC News, Raddatz was in Baghdad when she learned about a platoon of 1st Cavalry Division soldiers who had embarked in April 2004 on what they thought would be a routine community-outreach mission (they were assisting with sewage disposal, to put it delicately) in the massive Shiite slum of Sadr City. Without warning, the once pro-U.S., Saddam Hussein-hating enclave erupted into an anti-American shooting gallery. The 1st Cav platoon was pinned down by members of the firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Shiite militia, the Mahdi Army -- hundreds of them. The Long Road Home details the increasingly desperate and unquestionably heroic attempts to save the troops and reclaim order in an impoverished district that's home to some 2.5 million Iraqis. There isn't a hint of political bias in the book, but by focusing on this pivotal firefight, Raddatz illuminates a key moment when Iraq's sectarian strife mutated into the ferocious, unrelenting insurgency it is now."

The book's title, "The Long Road Home," seems very appropriate, very apt.