Saturday, September 26, 2009

The General's Book Club: What's Petraeus Reading?


I love spotting books in the background of photos, and here's today's mystery. I've spent a fair amount of time tracking the reading habits of candidate and president Obama, and we've seen some of his favorites get a boost into our top 100. But he's not the only member of the government who can sell a book. I'm not sure if General David Petraeus, the cerebral CentCom commander, has released any reading lists, but no doubt his influence (or at least his example) has helped a book like The Accidental Guerrilla, by his Australian advisor David Kilcullen, become an unlikely bestseller on Amazon.

So my question for today, based on this AFP/Getty photograph of the general at this week's Marine counterinsurgency conference, which I came across on Tom Ricks's Best Defense blog: what book does he have on the table next to him? The title clearly is "Wildcat", but I can't decipher the author name. I thought my Amazon search skills were pretty good, but I can't find a book that matches the cover. (This is the closest I came.) I'm guessing the subtitle is not "The Joe B. Hall Story."

Anybody better versed in the subject, or in data extraction, who can help me out? --Tom

Update: In the comments, Lauren solved the puzzle with better sleuthing skills than mine--thanks! And the answer is even more interesting than I'd hoped: the book is Wildcat: Irak 1991/2003 : Carnets de guerre d'un journaliste rebelle by the Belgian soldier-turned-war correspondent Yves Debay. It's not available on Amazon.com or Amazon.ca, but we do have it on Amazon.fr. I'm not sure if he was reading the book or was given it at the conference, but to be reading a book by a "rebel journalist"--in the original French--certainly would be consistent with the Petraeus mystique...

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