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Knopf
September 2008
On Sale: September 16, 2008
384 pages ISBN: 0307266397 EAN: 9780307266392 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
From the front lines of the battle against Islamic
fundamentalism, a searing, unforgettable book that captures
the human essence of the greatest conflict of our time. Through the eyes of Dexter Filkins, the prizewinning New
York Times correspondent whose work was hailed by David
Halberstam as “reporting of the highest quality
imaginable,” we witness the remarkable chain of events that
began with the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s, continued
with the attacks of 9/11, and moved on to the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq. Filkins’s narrative moves across a vast and various
landscape of amazing characters and astonishing scenes:
deserts, mountains, and streets of carnage; a public
amputation performed by Taliban; children frolicking in
minefields; skies streaked white by the contrails of B-52s;
a night’s sleep in the rubble of Ground Zero. We embark on a foot patrol through the shadowy streets of
Ramadi, venture into a torture chamber run by Saddam
Hussein. We go into the homes of suicide bombers and into
street-to-street fighting with a battalion of marines. We
meet Iraqi insurgents, an American captain who loses a
quarter of his men in eight days, and a young soldier from
Georgia on a rooftop at midnight reminiscing about his
girlfriend back home. A car bomb explodes, bullets fly, and
a mother cradles her blinded son. Like no other book, The Forever War allows us a visceral
understanding of today’s battlefields and of the
experiences of the people on the ground, warriors and
innocents alike. It is a brilliant, fearless work, not just
about America’s wars after 9/11, but ultimately about the
nature of war itself.
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