What Happened Here:Bush Chronicles
A caustic and hilarious dissection of the Bush years
With wit and anger, the author of the blackly comic What I Heard About Iraq takes us through the administration of the ‘Bush junta’. Eliot Weinberger begins with the inauguration of George W. Bush and the actions and policies that presaged an invasion of Iraq even before the terrorist attack of 9/11. Giving a moving account of downtown Manhattan, where he lives, on the day after the attack, he accounts for the feeling of lost innocence in the United States. On the aftermath of 9/11, Weinberger goes on to excoriate the Bush administration for its panic peddling and massive and secret arrests of ‘suspects’, as well as the contrived ‘intelligence’ that led to the war on Iraq. Ranging from personal journalism to political analysis, Eliot Weinberger traces the nightmarish absurdities of the Bush administration with incisive elegance. Includes What I Heard About Iraq in 2005, the sequel to his earlier work. What Happened Here was nominated for a 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.
Reviews
Eliot Weinberger is a master essayist, a furious thinker and an exceptionally elegant writer.
'It stands to reason that Eliot Weinberger, an old Borges hand, should be so adept at teasing out the nightmarish, nearly phantasmagoric dimensions of our country's post-9/11 situation.
No neocon has opened his or her mouth without the poet Eliot Weinberger hearing it and never forgiving.
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The essays collected in What Happened Here put forth such a wise indictment of the current President that reading it is like being punched in the solar plexus...like Joan Didion, Weinberger is a master of distilling massive amounts of information into a compelling takedown, and even readers who are already on his progressive wavelength will feel roused by his well-articulated anger.
Time Out New York