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Timothy Kurek is an incredible author.

Education & Early career
He was born Gregory Lane Barrett in Bristol, Tennessee, on the 23rd of November 1961. He grew up in Bristol, Virginia, and graduated from Bristol's Virginia High School in 1980. He is a 1986 graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. Prior to college, he was a factory worker at Burlington Industries in Bristol, TN. For more than twenty years in print journalism he worked as a local, national and foreign correspondent for, among others, The Augusta Chronicle (Georgia), The Charlotte Observer (North Carolina), The Honolulu Advertiser, the Gannett Company's GNS/USA Today bureau in Washington, D.C., and for The Baltimore Sun.

Most Recent Book


In October 2012 Barrett's narrative nonfiction book The Gospel of Rutba: War, Peace and the Good Samaritan Story in Iraq was released by Orbis Books, a leading U.S. publisher of religious books and the publishing arm of the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers. The book was edited by Orbis publisher Robert Ellsberg, son of Daniel Ellsberg, the whistle-blower responsible for releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971. In The Gospel of Rutba Barrett tells the story of three U.S. Christian peacemakers who were injured in a bad car accident in Iraq during the U.S.-led bombing of that country in March 2003. He chronicles how the western desert town of Ar Rutba, a Sunni-majority town under heavy attack from the United States, turned the other cheek and cared for the injured Americans: author-activist Shane Claiborne of Philadelphia's The Simple Way; Christian Peacemaker Teams veteran Cliff Kindy; and Mennonite pastor-activist Rev. Weldon Nisly. Three days earlier, on March 26, 2003, Rutba's only hospital had been bombed by U.S. Army Special Forces. After rescuing, treating and protecting the peacemakers, Rutba locals refused the Americans' effort to pay them. Dr. Farouq Al-Dulaimi, the director of the hospital bombed three days earlier, asked for the Americans to do only one thing: "Go and tell the world about Rutba." Seven years later, Barrett, who had reported from the streets of prewar Iraq in January and February 2003 alongside three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee Kathy Kelly, returned to Iraq with the unarmed peacemakers in an effort to tell the story of Rutba. Archbishop emeritus Rev. Desmond Tutu contributed the book's foreword and The Simple Way's Shane Claiborne, author of The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical, wrote its afterword.