Places and names : on war, revolution, and returning

Places and names On war, revolution, and returning

Elliot Ackerman

Book - 2019

"From a decorated Marine war veteran and National Book Award Finalist, an astonishing reckoning with the nature of combat and the human cost of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. Toward the beginning of [this book], Elliot Ackerman sits in a refugee camp in southern Turkey, across the table from a man named Abu Hassar, who fought for al-Qaeda in Iraq and whose connections to the Islamic State are murky. At first, Ackerman pretends to have been a journalist during the Iraq War, but after establishing a rapport with Abu Hassar, he takes a risk by revealing to him that in fact he was a Marine special operations officer. Ackerman then draws the shape of the Euphrates River on a large piece of paper, and his one-time adversary quickly... joins him in the game of filling in the map with the names and dates of where they saw fighting during the war. They had shadowed each other for some time, it turned out, a realization that brought them to a strange kind of intimacy. The rest of Elliot Ackerman's extraordinary memoir is in a way an answer to the questions of why he came to that refugee camp, and what he hoped to find there. By moving back and forth between his recent experiences on the ground as a journalist in Syria and its environs and his deeper past in Iraq and Afghanistan, he creates a work of astonishing atmospheric pressurization. Ackerman shares vivid and powerful stories of his own experiences in combat, culminating in the events of the Second Battle of Fallujah--the most intense urban fighting for the Marines since Hue in Vietnam--where Ackerman's actions leading a rifle platoon saw him awarded the Silver Star. He weaves these stories into the latticework of a masterful larger reckoning with contemporary geopolitics through his vantage as a journalist in Istanbul and with the human extremes of both bravery and horror. At once an intensely personal book about the terrible lure of combat and a brilliant meditation on the deeper meaning of the past two decades of strife for America, the region and the world, Places and Names bids fair to take its place among our greatest books about modern war."--Dust jacket.

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Subjects
Ackerman, Elliot.
United States. > Marine Corps > Officers > Biography.
Iraq War, 2003-2011 > Biography.
Biographies.
Autobiographies.
Genres
Biographies
Autobiographies
Published
New York : Penguin Press 2019.
Language
English
Main Author
Elliot Ackerman (author)
Physical Description
xix, 232 pages ; 24 cm
ISBN
9780525559962
  • Prologue: The Revolution Is Over, or The Music Will Live Forever
  • The Triumph of Death (Summer 2013)
  • The Fourth War (Autumn 2013)
  • In Dara'a, a Spark and Fuel (Spring 2011)
  • Expatriates (Winter 2014)
  • A Prayer for Austin Tice (Winter 2014)
  • Black in the Rainbow, Bergdahl and the Whale (Summer 2014)
  • The Suleimani Photograph (Summer 2014)
  • Safe on the Southbank (Summer 2014)
  • No Friends but the Mountains (Autumn 2014)
  • Paradox (Autumn 2004)
  • What's Buried in the Devil's Mountain (Winter 2015)
  • My Last Movie Night (Spring 2011)
  • The Imitation Game at Tel Abyad (Summer 2015)
  • A Thousand Discords (Summer 2015)
  • A Swiss Wedding (Summer 2015)
  • Back to the City (Autumn 2016)
  • A Summary of Action (Epilogue)
Review by Booklist Review

In this searing, contemplative, and unforgettable memoir-in-essays, Ackerman, a National Book Award-nominated novelist (Dark at the Crossing, 2017) and former marine, considers his years of service from his current home in Istanbul. He begins with a discussion of the Syrian Civil War and introduces Abed, his close friend, whose life, hopes, and views are a central focus throughout. In subsequent pieces, Ackerman discusses such varied topics as the rise of the Islamic State (including an interview with a former jihadi), Kurdish history, the friends he lost while serving, the paradoxes of military service, and even his teenage skating years in London. Through memories and his present work as a journalist, Ackerman constantly revisits his traumas; for instance, the essay, A Summary of Action, which comments on the terse prose of his Silver Star award report, is an incredible re-creation of what he experienced in Fallujah. Deeply personal yet never losing sight of the big, historical reasons for recent events, this collection recalls Michael Herr's classic Dispatches (1977) as well as William T. Vollmann's voluminous ruminations on violence in Rising Up and Rising Down (2003), and is perhaps the finest writing about the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts that has been published to date.--Alexander Moran Copyright 2019 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

"Wars are no longer punctuated by clear declarations of victory or defeat," writes journalist, novelist, and ex-Marine Ackerman (Dark at the Crossing) midway through this lyrical war memoir and consideration of American military interventions in the Middle East. Through a chance connection, Ackerman befriends Abu Hassar, an Iraqi who fought on many of the same battlegrounds he did--but for al-Qaeda. Through the lens of this unlikely relationship and another with the young Syrian activist Abed, Ackerman examines the scars etched on the landscape, its inhabitants, and those, like him, who came there to fight: for both his fellow Americans and Syrian democratic rebels, he writes, "our wars each devolved into disasters for the same reason: by trying to unleash sweeping change in the region, we created the conditions for extremists to rise." Memory continuously draws him back to the places they fought: "I am defined by a place I might return to someday, the idea that somewhere on my life's horizon is a time when I'll again walk those streets knowing my war is finished." He brings together a poetic sensibility (imbuing unforced significance into chess games, T-shirt slogans, and other happenstance details) and clear-eyed understanding of the political forces at work in the Middle East. That combination will appeal to fans of reflective, well-honed memoir, and those with an interest in geopolitics. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit. (June)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Former Marine Ackerman (Dark at the Crossing) crafts his memoir in a unique and entertaining format. Rather than writing chronologically, he begins in the present day with his travels to Syria and Iraq. He befriends a man named Abed who saw the start of the democratic revolution in Syria and introduces Ackerman to another man named Abu Hassar, who was himself involved with ISIS. Hassar and Ackerman realize they were combatants on opposite sides of war, both dealing with the effects of the conflict, the deaths of friends, and the memories of harsh battles. Throughout, Ackerman goes back and forth between his visits to today's Syria and Iraq and his five tours of duty. The account contains many insights into the purpose of war and how it damages all parties involved. The bookend meeting with Hassar and the conclusion help to solidify the beauty of the work. VERDICT Any fan of Ackerman's previous novels (Waiting for Eden), memoirs on the Iraq or Afghanistan wars, and valuable outlooks on the nature of war and its combatants will find this phenomenal. [See Prepub Alert, 12/3/18.]-Jason L. Steagall, -formerly with Gateway Technical Coll. Lib., Elkhorn, WI © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A memoir of the war you can't leave behind.For Ackerman (Waiting for Eden, 2018, etc.), a former Marine who earned the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, and the Purple Heart, and so many of the others he met during his return to the battlefronts of the Middle East, there was no good reason for them to be drawn back there other than the feeling that war had given their lives purpose and that civilian life offered no fulfilling substitute. "If purpose is the drug that induces happiness," he writes, "there are few stronger doses than the wartime experience." The equation of war with happiness may jolt readers who haven't seen combat, but the power of this memoir comes from the author's illumination of paradoxes and contradictions that provide a common emotional denominator for soldiers who previously found themselves in wars where they discovered more than two sides. "For a moment we sit, three veterans from three different sides of a war that has no end in sight," writes Ackerman of his bonding with two friends who might have been categorized as Muslim terrorists, one of whom would later ask him to be best man at his wedding. "Not the Syrian Civil War, or the Iraq War, but a larger regional conflict," one in which they discovered "a unifying thread between us: friendships born out of conflict, the strongest we've ever known." Throughout the poignant narrative there is a sense that the Americans for whom the author has fought have misunderstood the Muslims that he has fought against and that the boundaries dating back to the colonial era have never reflected the ethnic geography of those who inhabit the region. A story in which Ackerman made new friends and confronted old ghosts culminates in a flashback to the Battle of Fallujah and his memories of what took place.A profoundly human narrative that transcends nationality and ideology. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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