PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewGriswold reports so much government neglect, deception and collusion ... Her impressive research notwithstanding, Amity and Prosperity is at heart a David and Goliath story fit for the movies. It has everything but a happy ending ... Mood carries the story ... Through most of the action she strives to be polite.
David Finkel
PositiveNew Left ReviewIt is a better book than its predecessor, a harder book. Reading it is an act of endurance. Its violence does not have the frisson of embedded war reporting, whose events have a beginning and an end, and which tends to redeem the terrible acts of the band of brothers while placing the terrible acts of their enemy beyond explanation. Violence here...is embedded in the soldier’s being, an emotional EFP, waiting, exploding anywhere and in every direction, again and again and again … The book and everyone in it are silent on the politics of the war, and how it inflects the after-war. That, too, is a political decision. But then, as lived by Finkel and the soldiers to whom he entrusted himself for eight months, the war was felt to be outside politics, with no logic or argument, only fear and heartbreak and the effort to survive.
