About this title: A prizewinning "New York Times" correspondent chronicles a remarkable chain of events that begins with the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s, continues with the attacks of 9/11, and moves on to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Description: Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Date Published: 2009-06-02
ISBN-13:9780307279446ISBN:0307279448
Description: New. New, unread, unused & in perfect condition with no damaged or missing pages. Pre-release book with plain cover and publisher stickers. Great Copy. Ships Lightning Fast. read more
Description: New. THIS IS A NEW BOOK! Book has almost no shelfwear; Check out my performance reviews. My customers LOVE my service! Delivery confirmation available for every item shipped. Reliable customer service and no-hassle return policy. read more
Edition: First Edition; First Printing
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Date Published: 2008
ISBN-13:9780307266392ISBN:0307266397
Description: Very Good+ in Very Good dust jacket. 0307266397. Book and DJ have light edgewear; DJ has 1/4" tear to top edge; b/w photos; 384 pages. read more
Edition: 1st Paperback
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Vintage Books, New York
Date Published: 2009
Description: Very Fine in None Issued jacket. Selected as a New York Times Best Book of the Year, travel with this reporter through fundamentalist Taliban in the 1990's. Book is in very fine condition with just the slightest corner wear. No markings or creases. read more
Edition: Advance Review Copy
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Date Published: 2008
ISBN-13:9780307266392ISBN:0307266397
Description: Very Good+ with no dust jacket. 9780307266392. A crisp, clean tight unread proof with shelving damage to lower rear cover edge only-closed tear and pull to wrapper finish. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Date Published: 2009
ISBN-13:9780307279446ISBN:0307279448
Description: New. Brand New! Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Vintage Books
Date Published: 2009-06-02
ISBN-13:9780307279446ISBN:0307279448
Description: NEW. Softcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9780307279446. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: VINTAGE Country = UNITED KINGDOM
Date Published: 2009
ISBN-13:9780099523048ISBN:0099523043
Description: BRAND NEW PAPERBACK. 384 pages. Captures the human experience-and tragedy-of war. this book offers a visceral understanding of the war on the terror, its victims, the people who fight it and the way these people feel. illustrations (Paperback) read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc
Date Published: 2008-09-16
ISBN-13:9780307266392ISBN:0307266397
Description: NEW. Hardcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9780307266392. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Knopf
Date Published: 2008
ISBN-13:9780307266392ISBN:0307266397
Description: New. Brand New! Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
Edition: First edition. 1st edition
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Date Published: 2008
ISBN-13:9780307266392ISBN:0307266397
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. ~~Clean text, tight binding, like new. Slight wear to top edge of dust jacket. Support Independent Pacific Northwest Booksellers! 368 p. read more
"Filkins has drawn upon decades' worth of journalistic experience in Afghanistan and Iraq to craft a book of current affairs so vivid that you're as likely to find it on the memoir or poetry shelves as in the history section.
At face value the title seems overtly leftist, but Filkins has had his fill of partisanship. He has seen the consequences of both too much government and too little; the consequences of American intervention and of isolation. The title works on many levels, the most powerful of which is the most personal: after years of covering wars, Filkins himself cannot let go of what he has witnessed. He relives it even after he has left it. It will never end neither for him nor for anyone who has survived it.
Nor will it be a conflict that will end within our lifetimes. One of the book's greatest strengths is its illustration of the range of mindsets that populate Iraq. The region's particular human chemistry, illuminated by Filkin's careful notation, leads to volatile ends. Radicals exist in all political camps. A government undermined by radicals cannot protect peaceful citizens. A military which crushes radicals risks murdering citizens and radicalizing survivors. And so it goes.
A seasoned veteran in his own way, Filkins is wise enough not to recommend a tonic, wise enough to know there isn't one. Yet he's not jaded enough to cease paying homage to people who have held on to their nobility, courage and generosity throughout these conflicts. He recognizes he owes his life to countless heroes of many different nationalities. In the end, virtue which survives and even thrives amidst savagery redeems our species from total degradation, and the book from mere existentialism."
"Named one of the "10 best books of 2008" by the New York Times and brandishing a National Book Critics Circle Award, The Forever War by journalist Dexter Filkins has been leering at me from my Need-To-Read list for quite some time. "Consider the source," I warned myself as I first cracked it open; bracing myself for the far, far, far left wing swing I expected from a book written by a former reporter for both the L.A. and New York Times. "Be patient," my inner voice also advised, as I anticipated a long two-week trek of forcing myself through a dry and emotionless propaganda spew, chapter by painful chapter.
Forty eight hours later, I was done. And I was so very, very wrong. There, I said it.
The book begins with Mr. Filkins recounting some of his more colorful experiences in Afghanistan prior to the American military intervention. A barbaric judicial ritual, mangled bodies, and an emotionally, economically, and spiritually exhausted nation are the main take-aways. But then, without pause, explanation, or even the outline of a travel itinerary, Mr. Filkins is suddenly in Iraq. I can't be sure that he wrote this transition-less transition for the purpose of creating the impression it left readers (like me) with, but I hope so. It was a "wow, how did we end up here?" sort of a moment... much like the war itself. The United States was supposedly trucking right along in Afghanistan when, poof! Iraq, here we come! It was just that quick, and just that inevitable. (Complete review available at www.whatrefuge.blogspot.com)"
"Terrific. My only complaint is that the story ends before more current events, such as the Surge, take place. (I'd love to read Filkins on-the-ground take on that.) However, there is a moment late in the book where Filkins interviews an Iraqi terrorist who is getting more than a bit sick of Al-Qaeda (the "foreigners") killing fellow Iraqis. It's something of a sea change, since the result is an ordered hit against two Al-Qaeda gunmen. I was also hoping for more on Afghanistan, probably because it's in the news a lot now. But these are not reasonable complaints, and Filkins probably spent more time in Iraq than most. The Forever War is probably the most personal of all the Iraq accounts I've read so far. And so far the best. Maybe more on this later..."
"I withheld a star despite my belief that this book MUST be read; read today.
Filkins writes about his experiences as a war reporter in Afghanistan and Iraq (mostly the book is about Iraq). It is composed of short, medium, and long vignettes. He makes no effort to connect them.
It works as fiction works, implicitly. Mainly Filkins describes his situations and leaves his readers the job of interpreting. Some of these are as mundane as jogging along the Tigris river. Others are in the middle of firefights. His descriptions and his multiple angles reminded me how the show "The Wire" works. That is the highest praise I can deliver.
Sometimes I detested Filkins. He does not hide his loyalty to the U.S. soldiers with whom he is embedded. But because he does not hide his commitments (neither does he parade them), the reader can sense when he is trying to stretch himself towards Afghans and Iraqis. To some degree Afghans and Iraqis get to tell their story. But locals with whom he speaks are translators, drivers, photographers, snitches, and con artists. It is rare indeed for Filkins to portray an Afghan or Iraqi as an equal, as a seriously considered adversary.
This bias comes out especially strongly near the end of the book. The section called "The Departed," is an homage to the dead. Here especially I felt the absence of proportion, an inability to imagine adversarial Iraqis as whole human beings. The "acknowledgments" are also revealing. The confirm my sense of Filkins mostly uncritical embrace of the status quo.
Still, I found the book compelling. I wouldn't hesitate to use it in a classroom. Filkins strength is an overwhelming faithfulness to the messiness of the concrete details. This not only gives us a thousand images for each word (to invert the usual saying), but allows us the benefit of our own interpretations.
Here is book that is wholly better than the author. I am not sure I would turn down a chance for coffee with Filkins, but nor am I sure I wouldn't have some sharp question I would like to put to him. He is better than, say the likes of Steve Coll (Ghost Wars) but not as humane as Mary Anne Weaver (Children of the Jihad).
I offer three of my favorite quotations from the book below.
(1)
There were always two conversations in Iraq, the one the Iraqis were having with the Americans and the one they were having among themselves. The one the Iraqis were having with us - that was positive and predictable and boring, and it made the Americans happy because it made them think they were winning. And the Iraqis kept it up because it kept the money flowing, or because it bought them a little peace. The conversation they were having with each other was the one that really mattered, of course. That conversation was the the chatter of a whole other world, a parallel reality, which sometimes unfolded right next to the Americans, even right in front of them. And we almost never saw it. 115
(2)
"I am so tired," Yusra said. "In Saddam's time, I knew that if I kept my mouth shut, if I did not say anything against him, I would be safe. But now it is different. There are so many reasons why someone would want to kill me now: because I am Shia, because I have a Sunni son, because I work for the Americans, because I drive, because I am a woman with a job, because" - she picked up her abaya - "I don't wear my stupid hejab."
She took my notebook and flipped it to a blank page. This was Yusra's way of explaining her situation and, sensing the limitations of language, she would sometimes seize a reporter's notebook and diagram her predicament. She drew a large circle in the middle.
"This was Saddam," She said. "He is here. Big. During Saddam's time, all you had to do was stay away from this giant thing. That was not pleasant, but not so hard."
She flipped to another blank age. She drew a dozen circles, some of them touching, some overlapping. A small galaxy. She put her pen in the middle and made a dot.
"The dot I the middle, that is me - that is every Iraqi," she said. "From everywhere you can be killed, from here, from here, from here." She was stabbing her pen into the notepad.
"We Iraqis," she said. "We are all sentence to death and we do not know by whom." 326
(3)
When I was in Iraq, I might as well have been circling the earth from a space capsule, circling in farthest orbit. Like Laika in Sputnik. A dog in space. Sending signals back to base, unmoored and weightless and no longer keeping time. Home was far away, a distant place that gobbled up whatever I sent back, ignorant and happy but touchingly hungry to know. And then I was back, back in the world with everyone else, looking back on the ship myself though not returning all the way, still floating like Laika, through the regular people in the regular world.
Back in the world, people were serious, about the fillings in their sandwiches, about the winner last night's ballgame. I couldn't blame them of course. For me, the war sort of flattened things out, flattened things out here and flattened them out there, too. Toward the end, when I was still there, so many bombs had gone off so many times that they no longer shocked or even roused; the people screamed in silence and in slow motion. And then I got back to the world, and the weddings and the picnics were the same as everything had been Iraq, silent and slow and heavy and dead. Your days may die but your dreams explode. Not with any specific recollections; they were more the by-products of the raw material I carried back. Rarely anything I saw. 339-40."
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