There may be no sadder job than that of director of Iraq’s National Library and Archive in Baghdad. “After the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, looters pillaged and burned the library. Now, on the brink of the fourth anniversary of Saddam Hussein’s fall, and several weeks into a new security offensive, [Saad] Eskander and his staff are struggling to preserve the fragments of Iraq’s ancient heritage at a place he calls the ‘historical memory of the country.'”