Thank You for Your Service

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, October 2013: How do you make war personal? It s not easy, especially when writing about a war that the public has basically given up on (or was never that interested in to begin with). Descriptions of violence that most of us will never see can lose their potency and trail off toward the abstract; it happens in even the best novels and nonfiction. But what David Finkel has done is to follow the troops home from Iraq to cover their after-war. Their struggles and suffering back in the States are easier for us to relate to, and Thank You For Your Service is an absolutely mesmerizing account of the pain and hope that they carry from day-to-day. This is an important book, and there are great truths inside, none more powerful than when Finkel writes: while the truth of war is that it s always about loving the guy next to you, the truth of the after-war is that you re on your own. --Chris Schluep