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I really enjoyed Rory Stewart's The Prince of the Marshes. He is a young guy, only a few years older than us, who seems to be very much in the mold of the 19th-century British soldier-diplomats... his first book, written when he was in his very early twenties, detailed how he walked through the Middle East and Afghanistan (I think it was, I have only skimmed it) on foot with only his dog for company. When the war started he joined the British state dept equivalent and was sent to Iraq for the very beginning of the "reconstruction," which he watched with a jaundiced oh-so-very-British eye. It's a very interesting read. He had a good eye for the weird power dynamics of local tribal issues, the Americans, the Italians, etc.