Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 956.70442
EAN num: 9780374138233
ISBN number: 0374138230
Label: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T)
Manufacturer: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T)
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 294
Printing Date: 1998-09
Publishing house: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T)
Sale Popularity Level: 2096878
Studio: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T)
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
A hilarious and horrific account of three journeys into the dark heart of contemporary Iraq.
Paul William Roberts very first visited Iraq during the Arab summit in 1990. He went back in 1991 during the Gulf War. One of the few Western journalists to get into Iraq, he was arrested by soldiers on the outskirts of Baghdad at the height of the Allied attack and witnessed the nightmarish effects of the bombing on the city's civilians and infrastructure. In 1995, he received a surprise invitation to the International Babylon Festival and was able to revisit what little was left of Baghdad.
Roberts ranges from a Hunter Thompson-like gonzo journalism to skilled historical analysis, untangling the complicated history of Iraq and its neighbors, to intrepid interviews, discussing movies and religion with a frightening array of madmen, from Hussein himself, the man 'whose mother looked like Anthony Quinn playing Mother Teresa,' to Assad Bayoud al-Tamimi, the less-than-benevolent father figure of the Islamic Jihad.
At once chillingly horrifying and hysterically funny, The Demonic Comedy is a unique travel memoir, an eyewitness testament to the horrors of dictatorship and the devastation of war.
Amazon.com Review:
A filmmaker and author of, among other books, the well-received India travelogue Empire of the Soul, Paul William Roberts writes as if he were Outside magazine's British correspondent, filtering extravagant irony through a bottle of Scotch. This could be distracting in a book about a place like Iraq; sometimes, indeed, his long-range metaphors stray their course. Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine what besides laughter might get a person through the absurdities of everyday life in Baghdad, where a 'political machine increasingly bent on shaping reality in its own image' has named everything after Saddam Hussein, and erected monstrous public memorials in its wake. 'There's not much that is secret about Iraq's secret police, the feared Mukhabarat,' Roberts writes. 'Its officers all have moustaches as much like Saddam's luxuriant broom of a growth as they can manage (and most Iraqi men can manage a reasonably prodigious facsimile).'
Shifting uneasily beneath the humor, though, lies the dark heart of the story, and it becomes darker as the book continues, revealing the soullessness of government leaders, the abuse of the Iraqi people, and, of course, the unsavory details of Western involvement in that country's history. The humour Roberts brings to the book turns out to be a necessary counterweight to tragedy. --Maria Dolan
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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If you haven't read anything yet by Paul William Roberts, it is a shame. Aside from being brilliant, hilarious, poignant, and deeply revealing, he is also a wonderful representative of Canada in all his journeys. His books are combination travelogue, deeply moving real life human drama, and historical summaries, leaving the reader feeling like he knows everything about the land and people he has just met for us. The very first book I read of his was 'Empire of the Soul', a masterpiece of Indian encounters, and although I am not always interested in his subjects, I will continue to read absolutely anything he will ever produce, simply on the fact that his books are always extremely enjoyable, and teach me a lot about things I could never know. 'Demonic Comedy' will teach you more about the middle east, the gulf war, and Saddam Hussein's Iraq than if you were to read every magazine and newspaper article about them from the past decade. And, although highly articulate and factual, it never becomes stale reading. How could it, when you read about his interview with Saddam himself and the utter hilarity which brought him there? As someone extremely picky about their reading, I highly recommend Roberts for your dose of intellectual airchair travel. Never have recipients of his books been disappointed by my gifts, no matter what their taste.
Enjoy!
Rated by buyers 
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Funny because Roberts has a strong sense of the absurd.
Interesting because he makes up his own mind about the situation in Iraq.
Flawed because he insists on spelling out every accent he hears, a device that is both condescending and tiresome. (His editor seems to have told him this, as after a few pages he makes an unconvincing claim to the effect that he is not actually laughing at the fact that non-native speakers of English don't all speak flawless English).
Rated by buyers 
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A wonderful mixture of history, theology, politics, human nature, travel, gallows humour and a plethora of reasons to re-examine our priorities as a nation and the official govt. party line. Certain passages were a little heady for me, but I'm no political scientist. Just buy it, you wont be sorry.
Rated by buyers -
The Demonic Comedy is a series of trips through Iraq with Canadian journalist Paul Roberts. His topic is serious, but the dark humour he finds on his journeys makes this book more accessible to the jaded modern reader. Most of us don't want to read the normal, boring, and self-important [stuff] that "reporters" churn out about their days in the Inter-Continental Hotels of the world's hotspots.
I'd highly recommend his book.
The only bad things I can say is that the US and the UK still want to bomb those poor [people] that hate Saddam as much as anyone. Plus, my copy had a few print setting and typographical errors but nothing horrible.
Try to find this book!
Rated by buyers -
Canadian resident Paul William Roberts is the equivelant of Joseph Campbell on Dave Barry. His theological background makes him the perfect medium for culture comparisons. He also has a modern day wit, perhaps borrowed from Hunter S. Thompson, but intergated into this tale of tragedy and woe so seamlessly that it kept me reading even through the history lessons that I may have snoozed through ordinarilly. Altogether a very different take on Iraq than the majority of the western world is used to. Buy it.
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