Riverbend Nomination
I don't normally get into the discussion of the role that blogs play in the larger public discourse, partly because I don't know and partly because I'm worried that I'd actually need to start reading more blogs to have a good sense of it. That said, I think it's unambiguously good news that Riverbend's Baghdad Burning has been nominated for BBC's Four's Samuel Johnson Award for Non-Fiction.
The news is a week old, which gives a sense of how infrequently I check Riverbend, though that's in part that the anonymous author doesn't write on a daily basis. But for anyone interested in the Iraq War, the blog is absolutely indispensable: informative, brutally candid, sometimes very funny, but far more often deeply unsettling. In addition to Juan Cole's Informed Comment and the grim "Bring 'Em On" reminders in Today in Iraq, Baghdad Burning is a testament to what blogs, at their best, can do.
I haven't enough loyalty to the blogosphere to suggest, having not read the other books under consideration, that Riverbend should win. But I can think of few other sources on the Internet as deserving of this kind of honor, or as deserving of its readers' gratitude.
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