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The Prisoner in His Palace: Saddam Hussein, His American Guards, and What History Leaves Unsaid Audiobook
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A book that, in the haunting tradition of In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song, lifts away the top layer of evil and finds complexity beneath, this is the bizarre tale of twelve young American soldiers who are deployed to Iraq in the summer of 2006.
Rather than fight the enemy in combat, the men are unexpectedly assigned to guard the country’s notorious leader—Saddam Hussein—in the months leading to his execution.
Living alongside, and caring for, their “high value detainee” in a former palace dubbed The Rock and regularly transporting him to his raucous trial, many of the men begin questioning some of their most basic assumptions.
Thoroughly researched and provocative, The Prisoner in His Palace contrasts two very different Saddams: the defiant, younger man who uses torture and murder as tools, and the older man who proves affectionate, charming, and unexpectedly courageous in the face of looming death.
In this artfully constructed narrative, Saddam, the “man without a conscience,” manages to get everyone around him to examine theirs. Many of those who bid goodbye to Saddam will be forever changed by the experience, and we wonder if we ourselves will.
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“Takes you inside the minds of the prisoner and his protectors, whose sole task it to guard the ‘Vic,’ or Very Important Criminal…The book is captivating…a study of how proximity has a propensity to be persuasive, even when the common area is a cell in the basement of a courthouse."
— Military Times
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“I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in our recent war in Iraq or in the heights and depths of human nature.”
— Karl Marlantes, New York Times bestselling author of Matterhorn and What It Is Like to Go to War -
“Searing…Bardenwerper breathes an impressive amount of life into a story that hurtles toward death from the opening page.”
— WarOnTheRocks.com -
“In skin-crawling detail, Will Bardenwerper effectively captures a unique time and place in an engrossing history. A singular study exhibiting both military duty and human compassion.”
— Kirkus Reviews -
“Expertly examines Saddam Hussein."
— Vanity Fair
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About Will Bardenwerper
Will Bardenwerper is the author of two nonfiction books, Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America, and The Prisoner in His Palace: Saddam Hussein, His American Guards, and What History Leaves Unsaid. He has contributed to the New York Times, the Washington Post, Harper’s, and other outlets. He served as an Airborne Ranger–qualified infantry officer in Iraq and was awarded a Combat Infantryman Badge and Bronze Star. Before working in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, he received a BA degree from Princeton and MA from Johns Hopkins University.
About Danny Campbell
Danny Campbell is an Earphones Award–winning narrator and an actor who has appeared in CBS’ The Guardian, the films A Pool, a Fool, and a Duel and Greater Than Gravity, and in over twenty-five commercials. He is a company member of the Independent Shakespeare Company in Los Angeles and is an adjunct faculty member at Santa Monica College.