Elvis Is Titanic

Zusatztext In the spring of 2005! twenty-five-year-old Rhodes Scholar Ian Klaus took a semester-long appointment at Salahaddin University in Arbil! the largest city in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. Officially he was there to lecture on American history and to teach English. Unofficially he was there because he felt obliged! as a young American! to help make Iraq a stable and successful country. With assignments from Elvis to Ellington! baseball to Tocqueville! Klaus strives to illuminate the American way for students far more attuned to our pop culture than to our national ideals. Klaus's account of his unusual opportunity offers an astonishingly frank glimpse of life in the other Iraq after Saddam. "Captivating." — The Wall Street Journal "Earnest! thorough and elegantly written. The author's knowledge of Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq (and the Western canon! for that matter) is prodigious." — The New York Observer "Instructive and valuable . . . . Klaus's sensitivity to his environs! his knowledge of the region's history! and his even-handed observations take his narrative beyond simple memoir." — Chicago Sun-Times Informationen zum Autor Ian Klaus, who now lives in New York City and Cambridge, Massachusetts, wrote for publications across the United States while he was in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is currently pursuing a doctorate in history at Harvard. Klappentext In the spring of 2005, twenty-five-year-old Rhodes Scholar Ian Klaus took a semester-long appointment at Salahaddin University in Arbil, the largest city in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. Officially he was there to lecture on American history and to teach English. Unofficially he was there because he felt obliged, as a young American, to help make Iraq a stable and successful country. With assignments from Elvis to Ellington, baseball to Tocqueville, Klaus strives to illuminate the American way for students far more attuned to our pop culture than to our national ideals. Klaus's account of his unusual opportunity offers an astonishingly frank glimpse of life in the other Iraq after Saddam. Leseprobe Chapter One: Beyond War “Incoming text message.” Class had let out and I was making my way across the city from one of the university’s campuses to another when I started to receive text messages from students I had dismissed not fifteen minutes before. It was a short walk, and though some of my friends preferred that I not take it alone, I picked my way through the more heavily guarded sections of Arbil, capital of the Kurdistan region of Iraq. Students on cell phones passed, kicking up dust on newly paved asphalt; security guards settled into their chairs in front of blast walls, sharing observations about the city’s construction cranes. Text messages kept coming. “Bounty? NO! Kit Kat? NEVER! Mars? . . . How about sugar?? Still can’t find anything as sweet as you!” Almost a year after first arriving in Iraq to teach American history and English, I had returned to the same university in Kurdistan to present a couple of lessons on American education and language. Moving across the city that day, trying to gather my bearings, I found myself as acutely aware of the fortifications and arms as I had been twelve months before: Why is that building so heavily guarded? Who is in that winding convoy? Is it wise to be staying in a hotel made of glass? The anxious imagination as perpetual motion machine—what catches my eye is commonplace to the locals. The bus drivers picking up familiar passengers, the cabbies gossiping at black-market gas stations, the storekeepers in the bazaar were not likely to be talking about checkpoints and armored vehicles. The students on cell phones, too, had concerns of their own beyond the Kalashnikovs that over the decades had become so ubiquitous they were almost invisible. Other forces, beyond those of bristling milit...

Product details

• Authors: Ian Klaus
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 09.09.2008
• EAN: 9780307276896
• ISBN: 978-0-307-27689-6
• No. of pages: 256
• Dimensions: 135 mm x 205 mm x 15 mm
• Series: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; Non-fiction book