Finalist for the National Book AwardThis is the startling portrait of an Oz-like place where a vital aspect of our government’s folly in Iraq played out.

The Washington Post’s former Baghdad bureau chief, Raviv Chandrasekaran, takes us with him into the Zone, into a bubble, cut off from wartime realities, where the task of reconstructing a devastated nation competed with the distractions of a Little America—-a half-dozen bars stocked with cold beer, a disco where women showed up in hot pants, and a parking lot filled with shiny new SUV’s-—much of it run by Halliburton. Most Iraqis were barred from entering the Emerald City for fear they would blow it up.

Drawing on hundreds of interviews and internal documents, Chandrasekaran tells the story of the people that inhabited the Green Zone during the occupation, from imperial viceroy L. Paul Bremer III to the fleet of "twentysomethings" hired to implement the idea that Americans could build a Jeffersonian democracy in the embattled Middle East.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran is an assistant managing editor of The Washington Post, where he has previously served as a bureau chief in Baghdad, Cairo, and Southeast Asia, and as a correspondent covering the war in Afghanistan. He lives in Washington, D.C.