From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

It is said that journalism is a first rough draft of history. If so, then some news events are of such lasting significance that they deserve a second draft. Last January, as allied bombers launched a massive airborne offensive against Iraq, it became clear to Joanne Pello, a vice president of the Time Inc. Book Co., that the stream of words and images appearing in TIME's pages were the grist of a good book. Pello discussed the possibility with her colleagues and then approached us. "We realized that this was a subject in which TIME had particular photographic and editorial expertise," she recalls.

In the past we've published books on photojournalism, the presidential campaign of 1988, the rise of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, and the 1989 Chinese army attack in Tiananmen Square. This idea clearly belonged to that tradition. Senior writer Otto Friedrich was quickly named editor and charged < with selecting a staff of writers and correspondents to contribute to the book, in addition to their magazine duties. As a team of production typesetters rushed to work out the technical details, graphics director Nigel Holmes began to plan the book's maps and charts.

Fortunately -- and this is a real luxury for magazine journalists -- we could wait until the war was over, and events began to move into historical perspective, before we sent the chapters off to press. The result of these efforts is Desert Storm: The War in the Persian Gulf, a 240-page hardback volume that began appearing in bookstores last week. The book, which is being published by the Time Inc. Book Co. and distributed by Little, Brown and Co., contains 129 color and black-and-white illustrations, many of which have never been published in the U.S.

Friedrich, whose 12th book, a portrait of Paris in the time of the artist Edouard Manet, will be published next spring, found that TIME's traditional blend of detail and analysis served him well on Desert Storm. "I edited the book much the same way I have edited at TIME," he says. "There's a different time frame, and the chapters are longer than a TIME article, but the essential spirit of the thing is the same: the attitude of reasonably objective observers describing what we have seen or learned." And, we might add, enjoying the luxury of sufficient time to write a second draft.