On September 11, Paul McGeough stood transfixed on the streets of downtown Manhattan. Only a month earlier he had been in Afghanistan, reporting on the humanitarian crisis gripping the country under Taliban rule. Now he was forced to run for his life as the World Trade Center’s second tower collapsed in a cloud of smoke and debris.

Foreign correspondents are forever on the road, but few find themselves in the right place at the right time as often as Paul McGeough. Within weeks of George W. Bush’s declaration of the War on Terror, he was back in Afghanistan, reporting from the trenches on the US-led war against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. What followed was twelve months hurtling around the globe, from shattered New York to the frontlines of war-torn Central Asia and the mess of the Middle East. He returned to New York for the anniversary of the terrorist attacks, and then it was back to Baghdad.

During that year he saw three colleagues killed in a Taliban ambush. He visited poverty-stricken villages and the lavish offices of Iraqi politicians. He interviewed Northern Alliance commanders, families of suicide bombers and families of September 11 victims. He was the house guest of an Afghan warlord and an unwelcome visitor to the Jenin refugee camp, destroyed by Israeli forces.

Dramatic, poignant and powerful, Manhattan to Baghdad provides an eyewitness account of the first year of the first major war in the new millennium. It is essential reading for a better understanding of the seismic changes taking place in the world we thought we knew.