Shatter the Nations

ISIS and the War for the Caliphate

De: Mike Giglio

Narrado por: Robert Fass

Unflinching dispatches of an embedded war reporter covering ISIS and the unlikely alliance of forces who came together to defeat it.

The battle to defeat ISIS was an unremittingly brutal and dystopian struggle, a multi-sided war of gritty local commandos and militias. Mike Giglio takes listeners to the heart of this shifting, uncertain conflict, capturing the essence of a modern war.

At its peak, ISIS controlled a self-styled "caliphate" the size of Great Britain, with a population cast into servitude that numbered in the millions. Its territory spread across Iraq and Syria as its influence stretched throughout the wider world.

Giglio tells the story of the rise of the caliphate and the ramshackle coalition - aided by secretive Western troops and American airstrikes - that was assembled to break it down village by village, district by district. The story moves from the smugglers, traffickers, and jihadis working on the ISIS side to the victims of its zealous persecution and the local soldiers who died by the thousands to defeat it. Amid the battlefield drama, culminating in a climactic showdown in Mosul, is a dazzlingly human portrait of the destructive power of extremism, and of the tenacity and astonishing courage required to defeat it.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2019 Mike Giglio (P)2019 PublicAffairs

Reseñas de la Crítica

"[A] forthright account by an invested journalist unafraid to ask key questions about the many ramifications of the conflict" (Kirkus Reviews)

"Giglio's Shatter the Nations is more than a brave on-the-ground chronicle of the battle against ISIS - it is a lyrical, thrilling work that stands amongst the best of war literature." (Molly Crabapple, author of Drawing Blood and illustrator of Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War)

"With a reporter's unflinching eye and in a fine writer's clear prose, Mike Giglio has written a hypnotically compelling account of the rise and fall of the blood-drenched ISIS 'caliphate' in the Middle East. Unforgettable." (Jon Lee Anderson, staff writer for the New Yorker)

Most important book for the coming decade

I say this not simply for the vast and pervasive nature of ISIS, nor the risks the author took to tell it's story with the truth it deserves, nor even the sublime ease with which he wrote it, but mostly, because it is a story that cannot be heard in its entirety anywhere else.

This book will leave you with a deep sense of the importance of ISIS' origins and the social change that evolved around it, yet a naked helplessness for what it may mean for the future it has not yet finished nudging.

I imagine we will hear more from Mike Giglio, but this book will surely stand out as his defining work.