On Friday, October 12th at 3:00pm, hear Ian Klaus read from his
recently published memoir Elvis Is Titanic: Classroom Tales from
the Other Iraq at the Harvard Book Store. Klaus is a PhD candidate
in history. Details of the event can be found on the Harvard Book
Store's website at:
http://www.harvard.com/events/press_release.php?id=1905

>From the publisher...

In the spring of 2005, Ian Klaus, a twenty-six-year-old Rhodes Scholar,
traveled eight hours from Turkey, via broken-down taxi and armed
convoy, to reach Salahaddin University in Arbil, the largest city in
Iraqi Kurdistan. Elvis Is Titanic is the poignant, funny, and
eye-opening story of the semester he spent there teaching U.S. history
and English in the thick of the war for hearts and minds.

Inspired
by the volunteerism of so many young Americans after 9/11, Klaus
exchanges the abstraction of duty for an intimate involvement with
individual lives, among them Mahir, a rakish Kurdish pop star whose
father, an imam, disapproves of music; Ali, an Anglomaniac professor of
translation devoted to the BBC, with whom Klaus has a public showdown
over Hemingway; and Sarhang, Klaus’s bodyguard, whose interest in
American history is excited by Mel Gibson’s performance in The
Patriot.
Among the Kurds, a perennially oppressed but seemingly indomitable
people, Klaus encounters both openhearted welcome and resentful
suspicion—and soon learns firsthand how far even a trusted stranger can
venture in this society. With assignments ranging from Elvis to
Ellington, from the mysteries of baseball to the aperçus of
Tocqueville, Klaus strives to illuminate the American way for charges
initially far more attuned to our pop culture than our national ideals.

These efforts occasion Klaus’s own reexamination of truths we
hold to be self-evident, as well as the less exalted cultural
assumptions we have presumed to export to the rest of the world. His
story, as full of hope and discovery as he finds his students, offers a
slice of life behind the headlines.