I asked my colleagues to share some books that they read this year that stuck with them.
 | | Soldiers from the Second Battalion, 28th Infantry Regiment in Paktika Province, Afghanistan, in September 2011.Tyler Hicks/The New York Times |
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 | By Lauren Katzenberg Editor, At War |
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As 2019 comes to an end, I asked the At War team and our colleagues who cover national security and conflict at The Times to share some books that they read this year that stuck with them. Some of these titles informed their reporting (and mine), while others were read for pleasure. From World War II history to 1980s fiction, each book offers its own grim perspective on war and its true costs. |
Take a look our recommendations, and be sure to send me your own. |
“Attention Servicemember” |
By Ben Brody (Red Hook Editions, 2019) |
As Chris wrote in a recent newsletter, “Attention Servicemember” is “a reminder of the power of the Pentagon’s public-relations engines to shape false impressions of the wars and a mini reckoning, not unlike what we see playing out on larger stages as the Global War on Terrorism’s incoherence serves up fresh heartbreak and confusion each season.” |
By Amy Waldman (Little, Brown and Company, 2019) |
With shelves crowded with combat narratives from Afghanistan or Iraq, or the airbrushed memoirs of senior American military officers, Amy Waldman’s novel, “A Door in the Earth,” offers something else: “a convincing story of misplaced do-gooding,” according to its New York Times review, all set against the myth of a good occupation. |
Helene Cooper recommends: |
“Mau Mau: An African Crucible” |
By Robert B. Edgerton (Ballantine Books, 1991) |
“Mau Mau” offers the definitive account of Britain’s last grasp at control on the African continent and is an important reminder of Europe’s insistence on the superiority of white settlers over blacks in Africa, and its wide acceptance by the West. |
“A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier” |
By Ishmael Beah (Sarah Crichton Books, 2007) |
“Long Way Gone” chronicles the amphetamine-fueled tragedy of West African child soldiers in Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast and Liberia, and posits the question of how to turn an entire generation that knew nothing but war into people again. |
Thomas Gibbons-Neff recommends: |
“Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-89” |
By Rodric Braithwaite (Oxford University Press, 2013) |
In what stands out as one of the few comprehensive histories of the nearly decade-long war, almost seemingly forgotten after the American-led invasion of the country in 2001, Braithwaite’s nonfiction account of the Soviets in Afghanistan succeeds at portraying, and accounting for, the often foggy borders inherent in any conflict. The writing is fluid and compelling, rife with personal anecdotes from aid workers to Soviet infantrymen, all under the political shadow of the slow downfall of the Soviet Union. |
Lauren Katzenberg recommends: |
“Shatter the Nations: ISIS and the War for the Caliphate” |
By Mike Giglio (PublicAffairs, 2019) |
An important read on the rise of the Islamic State and the West’s fight to defeat the militant group, reported from the ground through beautifully captured human portraits. |
“Year Zero: A History of 1945” |
By Ian Buruma (Penguin Press, 2013) |
“Year Zero” offers an astonishingly detailed look at the violent rise of a new world order in 1945. It’s an important read as we enter 2020, in which we’ll be commemorating many 75th anniversaries tied to the end of World War II. |
“Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting From the Arab World” |
Edited by Zahra Hankir (Penguin Books, 2019) |
A refreshing anthology of essays by female writers whose work cut through the many clichés of Middle East reporting. Their accounts provide honest and raw depictions, recounted from their own experiences and from other women whose stories are often overlooked when reporting on foreign policy and conflict. |
By Don DeLillo (Penguin Books, 1986) |
Narrated by a college football player whose observations about the gridiron become progressively indistinguishable from fantasies of nuclear annihilation, Don DeLillo’s debut novel is a sharp and hilarious study of America, Cold War-era paranoia and the simultaneously poetic and militant pretensions upon which a national pastime is built. |
“Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience” |
By Gitta Sereny (Vintage, 1983) |
Gitta Sereny’s “examination of conscience,” specifically that of Franz Stangl, commander of the Treblinka death camp during World War II, is an intrepid work of journalism and perhaps the best book I’ve read about Nazi Germany, so affecting in the patient, sobering, methodical and engaging ways it forces its subject to confront the atrocities he helped carry out. |
David Zucchino recommends: |
“Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42” |
By William Dalrymple (Vintage Books, 2014) |
This is a fascinating account of the disastrous British experience in Afghanistan. In 1839, the British returned the exiled Shah Shuja as king, which soon triggered an Afghan rebellion that wiped out British occupation forces during a desperate midwinter attempt to escape to colonial India. This book is an essential reading for anyone following the complexities of 21st-century Afghanistan. |
Lauren Katzenberg is the editor of The New York Times At War channel. |
THE LATEST STORIES FROM AT WAR |
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Behind the Numbers: 2,000 |
 | | American soldiers in Afghanistan in 2011.Tyler Hicks/The New York Times |
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That’s the number of pages of the investigation by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction obtained this week by The Washington Post after a three-year legal battle. The documents attest to the fundamental confusion, indecision and disarray that has characterized the United States’ war in Afghanistan, which began in 2001. One general who advised Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama on Afghanistan strategy said the United States “didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.” Indeed, the documents reveal a ramshackle approach to regional politics, with the American military often shifting its priorities from combating extremism to stabilizing the government in Kabul, even as it was often unclear who its principal adversaries were. While many of the documented shortcomings were already widely known, the Afghanistan Papers, as they’re being called, provide a level of specificity about a $2 trillion war effort whose intentions have been opaque. As one anonymous official told investigators in 2016, “We were given money, told to spend it, and we did — without reason.” Read The Times’s takeaways from the Afghanistan Papers here. — Jake Nevins, Times Magazine editorial fellow |
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