by Thomas E. Ricks

Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

Fiasco, Thomas E. Ricks’s #1 New York Times bestseller, transformed the political dialogue on the war in Iraq-The Gamble is the next newsbreaking installment

Thomas Ricks’ second book on Iraq continues the account he began in Fiasco. He covers the war largely from a military viewpoint in contrast to Bob Woodward, who emphasizes the politics inside Washington.Ricks obviously admires Gen. Petraeus but does not cover over other views of the war and predictions of its aftermath.Some of the most interesting parts of the book are accounts of dissenters like Emma Sky, the British Middle East expert who spent three tours in Iraq and became a trusted advisor to Gen. Odierno. If Ricks does not eventually write a definitive history of the second Iraq war, his writings will be an important source for the author who completes that task.

Biography:

Thomas E. Ricks is The Washington Post’s senior Pentagon correspondent, where he has covered the U.S. military since 2000. Until the end of 1999 he held the same beat at The Wall Street Journal, where he was a reporter for seventeen years. A member of two Pulitzer Prize- winning teams for national reporting, he has reported on U.S. military activities in Somalia, Haiti, Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He is the author of Fiasco, Making the Corps, and A Soldier’s Duty.

PRESS REVIEW:

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani:

…powerful and illuminating …Mr. Ricks writes as both an analyst and a reporter with lots of real-time access to the chain of command, and his book’s narrative is animated by closely observed descriptions of how the surge worked on the ground, by a savvy knowledge of internal Pentagon politics, and by a keen understanding of the Iraq war’s long-term fallout on already strained American forces.

From Barnes & Noble:

The course of the Iraq War took a radical change in 2007. With military intellectual General David Petraeus at the helm, a new, unorthodox strategy generally dubbed “The Surge” emerged despite the resistance of top commanders. In The Gamble, Washington Post senior Pentagon correspondent Thomas E. Ricks utilizes hundreds of hours of exclusive interviews with key officers in Iraq and Washington to document this controversial shift in American Middle East policy. The author of Fiasco delivers another major book on the Iraq conflict.