Book: One Hundred and One Days

Overview
Åsne Seierstad's "One Hundred and One Days" is a first-person account from Baghdad during the early weeks of the 2003 Iraq War. Seierstad, a Norwegian journalist, remained in the city as coalition forces advanced, recording daily observations, conversations, and moments of sudden violence. The book functions as a chronicle of disintegration: of institutions, routines, and the sense of safety that once defined urban life.

Setting and Context
The narrative unfolds against the backdrop of a city under siege: tightened borders, intermittent electricity and water, and an ever-present fear of air strikes and ground incursions. Seierstad captures the atmospheric details of a capital suddenly deprived of order, where rumors spread faster than reliable information and public services collapse under the strain of conflict. The text situates personal experience within the larger political moment of an invasion that reshaped Iraq and reverberated worldwide.

Voices and Encounters
Seierstad embeds with Baghdad residents, moving through neighborhoods and homes to listen to a wide range of voices. She records conversations with ordinary citizens, professionals, traders, and those directly touched by violence, creating a mosaic of perspectives that resist easy categorization. Rather than speaking chiefly for Iraqis, she foregrounds their words and gestures, letting individual testimonies convey complexity, sorrow, and bewilderment.

Narrative and Reporting Style
The book is written in an immediate, observational style that blends reportage with literary detail. Short, diaristic entries and scene-based vignettes convey the tempo of life under duress: strict routines interrupted by curfews, sudden shortages, and the unpredictable arrival of troops. Seierstad balances descriptive passages with reflective moments, offering not only what she sees but how it feels to witness a society unspooling in real time.

Themes and Insights
Central themes include the human cost of military intervention and the fragile infrastructure that sustains everyday life. Seierstad traces how war magnifies preexisting social tensions and creates new urgencies, fuel shortages become existential problems, hospitals struggle without supplies, and civic trust frays. The book also interrogates how information, propaganda, and rumor shape behavior, illustrating the difficulty of discerning truth amid competing narratives and the consequences of external political decisions on private lives.

Ethics and Limitations
A recurrent ethical concern is the role of the foreign journalist in wartime settings: how to observe without exploiting, how to represent others' suffering responsibly. Seierstad acknowledges her outsider status and the limitations that come with language, cultural distance, and the necessity of selective reporting. Those choices shape the portrait readers receive, emphasizing certain neighborhoods, encounters, and crises while inevitably omitting others.

Impact and Reception
The book drew attention for its intimate, ground-level portrayal of Baghdad during a historically pivotal period. Many readers and critics praised its vividness and the empathy Seierstad brings to individual stories, while others debated the balance between subjectivity and journalistic distance. Regardless of these debates, the account endures as a powerful testament to the everyday consequences of war and a reminder of how quickly social order can collapse when violence becomes routine.