I don’t blog about politics or world affairs, much, but I’ll make an exception here for an excellent recent book: The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq, by George Packer. The author is a New Yorker writer who has expanded his reporting from Iraq over the last two years into this analysis of what the U.S. has done and is doing there.

And when you’re done with that, go read his Blood of the Liberals.

George Packer and I grew up in the Bay Area at the same time, and not far from one another, and our lives have intersected from time to time. His intelligence struck me when I first met him in 1979 (I was a high school senior, he a college freshman), and it — along with uncommonly graceful prose — makes his writing extraordinarily insightful, powerful, and vivid.