I just finished reading the book The Forever War by Dexter Filkins and
really want to recommend it. If you are not familiar with this
writer, he is a foreign correspondent for the New York Times and has
reported from Afghanistan and Iraq since before 9/11. I’ve read lots
of his reporting during the last few years and he is frequently on
NPR’s Fresh Air show when he comes home from the middle east. 

The Forever War was recently awarded the National Book Critics Circle
award for best general non-fiction from 2008. It has also been
selected as the best book of the year (for 2008) by the New York
Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Boston Globe, Time magazine
and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It’s easy to read, in the sense that
it’s conversational, not just facts. It’s hard to read, in places,
because he talks about the bad things that happen during war. But, I
think it’s a book that might be appropriate to ask your family or
friends who have tuned out our wars to read. And it was interesting
for me to read, having already read obsessively about the war in Iraq,
because he had access to the major players from many of the factions
that were fighting in Iraq as well as our troops and regular Iraqis.
The books starts out talking about Afghanistan before we began
fighting there and then moves on and mostly deals with the war in
Iraq. The Forever War has just come out in paperback.

Dexter Filkins is reporting from Afghanistan and Pakistan these days.

Suzi S.