Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier's Story of a Forgotten War

ISBN: 1616206918

Author: Friedman, Matti

Condition: Used

A book about young men transformed by war, written by a veteran whose dazzling literary gifts gripped my attention from the first page to the last. -The Wall Street JournalFriedmans sober and striking new memoir . . . [is] on a par with Tim OBriens The Things They Carried -- its Israeli analog. -The New York Times Book ReviewIt 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, Friedmans powerful narrative captures the birth of todays 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 OBrien. It is an unflinching look at the way we conduct war today.