Beyond the Book: Background information when reading Blood Brothers

Beyond the Book

This article relates to Blood Brothers

Michael Weisskopf is a senior correspondent for Time magazine, working out of Washington D.C. He is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of a number of awards for journalism including the Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism. As an investigative reporter for the nation section. he has scored many scoops, including the smoking-gun letter of FBI whistle-blower Coleen Rowley and broke stories on Arthur Andersen's shredding of Enron documents, President Bill Clinton's deal with prosecutors and several Monica Lewinsky stories.

In addition to Blood Brothers, he is co-author of two books: Truth At Any Cost, a book on the Kenneth Starr probe published in April of 2000, and Tell Newt to Shut Up, a book about the 1995 Republican revolution in congress, published in 1996.

He joined Time in 1997 after 20 years at the Washington Post where he covered money in politics, the environment and the Pentagon. Fluent in Chinese, he was the paper's correspondent in China from 1980 to 1985 and covered the hostage crisis in Iran in 1979 and 1980. Prior to joining the Post, he covered politics and government for The Baltimore Sun; and before that he worked at The Montgomery Advertiser in Montgomery, Alabama. He received his Master of Arts from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and his Bachelors degree from George Washington University. He lives in Washington with his wife Rebekah, a professional singer, and their three children.

He continues to work as a journalist - using voice activated software in place of a typewriter keyboard. He also continues to visit Walter Reed as a patient and a visitor, where he sees many amputees - the only difference being that he observes there are more double and triple amputees than there were when he was a patient, because the Iraq insurgency is using ever more powerful explosives.

Did you know?
At the end of September 2006 the death count for the Iraq coalition was 3,068, plus 44,779 casualties, of which 20,687 were wounded. The estimated number of Iraqi civilians reported dead is between 45,000-50,000; there does not appear to be a count of the injured.

Interesting Links

• Weisskopf's Time cover story about Ward 57, with links to other articles.
• An unofficial count of Iraq coalition deaths and injuries by period, includes a link to iraqbodycount.org/, which tracks the estimated civilian deaths.
• A visual count of the Iraq coalition deaths since 2003 to Feb 2007.

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This "beyond the book article" relates to Blood Brothers. It originally ran in November 2006 and has been updated for the September 2007 paperback edition. Go to magazine.

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