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A Soldier's Story
by Matti Friedman
It was just one small hilltop in a small, unnamed war in the late 1990s, but it would send out ripples that are still felt worldwide today
The hill, in Lebanon, was called the Pumpkin; flowers was the military code word for "casualties." Award-winning writer Matti Friedman re-creates the harrowing experience of a band of young Israeli soldiers charged with holding this remote outpost, a task that would change them forever, wound the country in ways large and small, and foreshadow the unwinnable conflicts the United States would soon confront in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.
Pumpkinflowers is a reckoning by one of those young soldiers now grown into a remarkable writer. Part memoir, part reportage, part history, Friedman's powerful narrative captures the birth of today's chaotic Middle East and the rise of a twenty-first-century type of war in which there is never a clear victor and media images can be as important as the battle itself.
Raw and beautifully rendered, Pumpkinflowers will take its place among classic war narratives by George Orwell, Philip Caputo, and Tim O'Brien. It is an unflinching look at the way we conduct war today.
"Starred Review. A compelling narrative, freighted with explosive geopolitical implications." - Booklist
"Starred Review. A haunting yet wry tale of young people at war, cursed by political forces beyond their control, that can stand alongside the best narrative nonfiction coming out of Afghanistan and Iraq." - Kirkus
"Evocative, emotionally wrenching and yet clear-eyed and dispassionate, Matti Friedman's haunting war memoir reminds one of Michael Herr's unforgettable Vietnam memoir,Dispatches. It too is destined to become a classic text on the absurdities of war." - Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and New York Times bestselling author of The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames
"Poignant and fascinating ... Matti Friedman tells a war story with a journalist's rigor and eye for detail and a poet's touch. This book about a 'forgotten' war manages to be lyrical, graceful and deeply evocative even when tackling the harshest subjects imaginable." - Lucette Lagnado, author of The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit and The Arrogant Years
"Pumpkinflowers is both an historical jigsaw puzzle and an examination of Israel's fraught national identity. Friedman recounts an almost forgotten moment in Israel's long entanglement with her neighbors, managing to illuminate the confusion at the heart of the conflict as well as chillingly echo America's own slide into prolonged wars in the Middle East." - Siobhan Fallon, author of You Know When the Men Are Gone
"Who knew that a story about forgotten boys fighting a forgotten war in a forgotten corner of Lebanon could teach us such universal human truths? Matti Friedman's requiem to youth and family and soldiering hits the mark to which all of us aspire. This book broke my heart." - Brian Castner, author of The Long Walk
This information about Pumpkinflowers was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Matti Friedman is the author of The Aleppo Codex, which won the 2014 Sami Rohr Prize, the ALA Sophie Brody Medal, and other awards, and Pumpkinflowers. A former correspondent for the Associated Press, his reporting has taken him from Israel to Morocco, Lebanon, the Caucasus, and Washington, DC, and his work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the New York Times, Tablet, and elsewhere. He was born in Toronto and lives in Jerusalem.
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