Rajiv Chandrasekaran
2007 recipient of the Ridenhour Book Prize
Rajiv Chandrasekaran is the author of
Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone
(Knopf, 2006), an exemplary work of reportage that takes us behind
the barricaded walls of Baghdad’s Green Zone. Chandrasekaran
chronicles how the Coalition Provisional Authority’s
bureaucratic arrogance and ineptitude led to disastrous postwar
planning and directly contributed to the chaos that we witness in
Iraq today.
The Ridenhour Book Prize honors Chandrasekaran’s
courageous reporting and recognizes Imperial
Life in the Emerald City as a work of profound social significance
that reveals the deadly consequence of American hubris.
In describing Imperial
Life in the Emerald City, the Pulitzer-Prize winning author
Steve Coll has written, “Every American who wants to understand
how and why things went so badly wrong in Iraq should read this
book.” The noted human rights journalist Samantha Power
adds that “by giving us the first full picture from inside
the Green Zone, [Chandrasekaran] depicts a mission doomed to failure
before it had even been launched.”
Chandrasekaran reported from the Green Zone as the Baghdad bureau
chief for the Washington Post. He spent
the six months leading up to the war in Baghdad, reporting on the
United Nations weapons-inspections process and the build-up to the
conflict. Before the U.S.-led war in Iraq, he was the Post’s
Cairo bureau chief. Prior to that assignment, he was the Post’s
Southeast Asia correspondent, based in Jakarta, Indonesia. He has
been a foreign correspondent for the Post
since 1999 and currently heads the Post’s
Continuous News department, which provides breaking news stories
for the paper’s web site, www.washingtonpost.com.
Chandrasekaran joined the Post in 1994
as a reporter on the metropolitan D.C. staff. A native of the San
Francisco Bay Area, he holds a degree in political science from
Stanford University, where he was editor-in-chief of the Stanford
Daily.
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