Penn State Berks will host a lecture by Joby Warrick, reporter for The Washington Post and recipient of multiple Pulitzer Prizes, at noon Wednesday, Nov. 16, in the Perkins Student Center Auditorium. The lecture will be followed by a book signing. This presentation is free and open to the public.
Warrick has been a reporter for The Washington Post since 1996, writing about the Middle East, diplomacy and national security. He has also covered the intelligence community, Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) proliferation and the environment, and served as a member of the Post’s investigative unit.
Most recently, he was honored with the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for his book, "Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS."
According to the publisher’s website, “Joby Warrick traces how the strain of militant Islam behind ISIS first arose in a remote Jordanian prison and spread with the unwitting aid of two American presidents. When the government of Jordan granted amnesty to a group of political prisoners in 1999, it little realized that among them was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a terrorist mastermind and soon the architect of an Islamist movement bent on dominating the Middle East.
In Black Flags, an unprecedented character-driven account of the rise of ISIS, Joby Warrick shows how the zeal of this one man and the strategic mistakes of Presidents Bush and Obama led to the banner of ISIS being raised over huge swaths of Syria and Iraq.
Drawing on unique high-level access to CIA and Jordanian sources, Warrick weaves gripping, moment-by-moment operational details with the perspectives of diplomats and spies, generals and heads of state, many of whom foresaw a menace worse than al Qaeda and tried desperately to stop it. Black Flags is a brilliant and definitive history that reveals the long arc of today’s most dangerous extremist threat.”
Prior to his work at The Washington Post, Warrick reported for The News and Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina, where he shared the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service with two other journalists, for a series of articles on "the environmental and health risks of waste disposal systems used in North Carolina's growing hog industry." Previously, he was an Eastern Europe correspondent for UPI and also worked for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Delaware County Daily Times.
Warrick is also the author of "The Triple Agent," a narrative culminating in the 2009 Camp Chapman attack in Afghanistan, which resulted in the murder of seven CIA employees by a suicide bomber.
For more information about this presentation, contact Christian Weisser, professor of English and program coordinator for the professional writing degree program at Penn State Berks, at 610-396-6416 or via email at crw17@psu.edu.