A review by tonydecember
Standard Operating Procedure by Philip Gourevitch
4.0
Co-written with Errol Morris as a companion to his film, this is a standout effort.
I read this a few months ago, and only afterward did I watch the film for the first time. I purposely approached it in this way intuiting that I might better understand the gravity of the circumstances and the people portrayed, and in this regard I believe the experience—the knowingness—was, in fact, more sharply defined.
Having also since read Morris's "Believing Is Seeing," about the power of photographs to distort and confound as well as illuminate and explicate, I realize that seeing the film before reading the book could have significantly transformed the context and content of these incidents at Abu Ghraib, and in this case maybe not to the benefit of my own better, deeper comprehension. I don't and can't know, of course, because I can't undo the experience and attempt it otherwise. But I do know that one's imaginative intellect when taking in the written word and translating it through the mind's eye is an entirely other species to that of the mind's interpretations of our physical sight, and each is vastly capable of it own colorations in how we imprint meaning.
Read the book, see the movie, and read Errol Morris's other writings. Fascinating stuff.
I read this a few months ago, and only afterward did I watch the film for the first time. I purposely approached it in this way intuiting that I might better understand the gravity of the circumstances and the people portrayed, and in this regard I believe the experience—the knowingness—was, in fact, more sharply defined.
Having also since read Morris's "Believing Is Seeing," about the power of photographs to distort and confound as well as illuminate and explicate, I realize that seeing the film before reading the book could have significantly transformed the context and content of these incidents at Abu Ghraib, and in this case maybe not to the benefit of my own better, deeper comprehension. I don't and can't know, of course, because I can't undo the experience and attempt it otherwise. But I do know that one's imaginative intellect when taking in the written word and translating it through the mind's eye is an entirely other species to that of the mind's interpretations of our physical sight, and each is vastly capable of it own colorations in how we imprint meaning.
Read the book, see the movie, and read Errol Morris's other writings. Fascinating stuff.