RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewRiveting ... Vivid ... Alexander adroitly explicates technical concepts — flight mechanics, de-icing, night vision — but is at her best rendering pilots’ fear ... Epic.
George Black
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewBlack focuses his attention largely on Vietnam’s Quang Tri and Thua Thien provinces along the Laotian border, home to a vital stretch of the Ho Chi Minh Trail ... Black presents an efficient military and political history. Readers well versed in the ample scholarship on the war years might find much of this material familiar, but Black’s immersion in a particular human geography — his attunement to aspects of terrain, climate, flora and fauna, as well as to the people’s intimate relationship to the land — brings home the enormity of the destruction anew ... In his fascinating description of life on the perilous Ho Chi Minh Trail, Black includes a vignette about a North Vietnamese porter.
David Finkel
RaveThe New York Times Sunday Book ReviewFinkel absents himself from the narrative, immersing the reader in the quotidian life of soldiers and their families. Thank You for Your Service is elegantly reported, free of the entanglements of crusading self-aggrandizement on the one hand and, on the other, an overidentification with its subjects. Finkel refuses to pathologize soldiers, even as he concentrates on the 20 to 30 percent who have been psychologically damaged to some degree by their service in Iraq or Afghanistan … This is not — nor should it be — an easy book. But it is an essential one. Finkel refuses to gild the misery and ugliness of the last decade and the unpoetic aftermath of war with the kind of sentimentality that has so often clouded our thinking, not only about our military commitments but also about the veterans they produce.
J. Kael Weston
MixedThe Washington PostJ. Kael Weston has written an angry book — perhaps too angry. The Mirror Test documents his seven years as a U.S. State Department political adviser to military units operating in some of the deadliest regions in Iraq and Afghanistan ... This problematic book’s three parts explore the 'the wrong war' in Iraq, the 'right' if neglected war in Afghanistan, and the 'disconnect' between those Americans who have been touched by war’s violence and the many more who have not ... The Mirror Test offers insights into tribal, cultural and religious dynamics; the limits of military power as a political instrument; the use of drones; the heavy reliance on special operators; cooperation and failed cooperation among military services, agencies and allies. Yet the analysis is somewhat impoverished by the fact that the diplomatic cable Weston regards as his most significant is classified, together with other material to which he occasionally alludes, and thus unavailable for this book. But Weston is hampered chiefly by his indignation, which, as Virginia Woolf once noted, causes a writer to 'swerve' from the story when it most demands attention.
