Elvis is Titanic
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rhodes scholar Klaus chronicles a 2005 semester spent teaching the English language and U.S. history in Arbil, showing that the semiautonomous, historically distinct region of Iraqi Kurdistan also experiences many of the contrasts, tensions and challenges facing Iraq as a whole in the post-Saddam years. Hoping to give his students a better understanding of the actions and character of the United States, Klaus leads discussions of African-American history and pop culture that invite both teacher and students to consider how American history might inform the problems and decisions facing the ethnically, religiously and politically divided Iraqis. Although well liked, Klaus finds his perspective frequently challenged by his students. The reader, too, might question the otherwise keen-eyed Klaus's largely unexamined faith in free markets, elections and the good intentions of U.S. foreign policy, this last leading him to dismiss specific questions about Bush administration ties to the oil industry as "unanswerable questions of conspiracy" or "fanciful tales of oil grabs." Nonetheless, these vignettes and profiles add welcome depth to the too homogenous image of the Kurds and Kurdish nationalism in the Western media.
