An astonishing reckoning with the nature of war from a National Book Award-shortlisted novelist and decorated former US marine.
ELLIOT ACKERMAN is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Halcyon, 2034, Red Dress In Black and White, Waiting for Eden, Dark at the Crossing, and Green on Blue, as well as the memoir The Fifth Act- America's End in Afghanistan, and Places and Names- On War, Revolution and Returning. His books have been nominated for the National Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal in both fiction and nonfiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize among others. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and Marine veteran who served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. He divides his time between New York City and Washington, D.C.
Elliot Ackerman's exceptional memoir is really a double memoir of
his own experiences as a Marine and those of a Jihadist fighter he
befriends in a refugee camp. The result is a superb, unique and
unforgettable story of war and death, fear and cruelty, above all
the horrors and allure of combat.
Elliot Ackerman's voice scares me. It's a bit too close for
comfort. He sees too much and he knows too much, and that makes him
a great guide to today's post-everything Middle East. Read him at
your own risk - but ignore this book at your own peril.
*Thomas E. Ricks, author of ‘Making the Corps,’ ‘Fiasco,’ and
‘Churchill and Orwell'*
Rare is the writer who can illuminate either the experience of the
individual or the larger context of the times in which we live.
Elliot Ackerman manages to do both. He is as adept at describing
the strange cocktail of emotions that accompany the moments
preceding combat as he is unraveling the Gordian Knot of
contemporary geopolitics. That he does so in the graceful, lucid
prose fans of his fiction have come to admire is even more
remarkable. Places and Names is an extraordinarily beautiful and
insightful work of memoir and journalism by a writer who deserves
to be read widely.
*Kevin Powers*
How often does one encounter a novel as perfectly shaped, as fresh,
as subtle and as explosive as this? I couldn't turn away from
Elliot Ackerman's latest taut wonder, and when I got to the final
page, I wanted to start all over again, in the light of the
haunting last words. Patiently, and unflinchingly, Ackerman is
becoming one of the great poet laureates of America's tragic
adventurism across the globe.
*Pico Iyer*
When I finished Elliot Ackerman's Places and Names my copy was
covered with bracketed paragraphs and underlined phrases. There is
no surer indicator of a book filled with insight and good writing.
Ackerman's honest searching to come to terms with his war
experience helped me better understand my own. This book is a gift
that should be shared with every American who helped pay for people
like Ackerman to fight their wars for them.
*Karl Marlantes, prize-winning author of Matterhorn and Deep
River*
Places and Names is its own profile in courage: the story of how a
Marine turned reporter struggled with the polemics of desolation in
the Middle East. Elliot Ackerman is a man of both action and
thought, and his book is closely observed, rigorously lived, and
clarifying for all of us who have not understood how U.S. policy in
the Islamic world went so terribly wrong.
*Andrew Solomon, author of 'Far and Away', 'Far From the Tree', and
'The Noonday Demon'*
In Places and Names, Elliot Ackerman, a soldier turned writer,
seeks out his former foes and confronts his own memories on
battlefields where the killing continues. The result is one of the
most profound books I have ever read about the real nature of war
and the abstract allure of the ideas and the bloodshed that fuels
it.
*Jon Lee Anderson*
Places and Names is a brilliant and gripping account of the
aftermath of failed wars and revolutions, and of the still burning
idealism that smolders in the wreckage. Elliot Ackerman brings a
novelist's skill with language, a reporter's eye for detail, and
his life experience as a highly decorated Marine veteran of five
deployments to bear in this unique and powerful meditation on
violence, heroism, and the fracturing of the Middle East."
*Phil Klay, National Book Award winning author of
‘Redeployment’*
What a great, honest book-the kind that makes one feel lucky to
have in one's hands. Ackerman has served his country twice: first
as an infantryman in our nations wars, and then as a guide-wise
beyond his years-who helps us understand what we've done. His prose
is easy and comfortable like an old jacket. His understanding of
war is so profound that one feels like secrets have been
revealed-truths-information that one day may be necessary for our
survival. Well done.
*Sebastian Junger, author of Tribe*
Elliot Ackerman fought the Long War, and now, with Places and
Names, he gives us a searingly honest record of his ongoing effort
to make sense of the war. This is, literally, a book of wanderings;
Ackerman's sojourns to conflict zones, old battlefields, and muddy
refugee camps recall the wanderings of that earlier soldier,
Odysseus, as he struggles to come home from war, and, no less than
his predecessor, Ackerman finds himself journeying through the
shadow world of ghosts and spirits that go by the name of memory.
Vivid, profound, restless, and relentlessly probing, Places and
Names is destined to become a classic of the Long War.
*Ben Fountain, author of 'Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk'*
Ackerman brings a fiction writer's touch to his reportage. The
soldier-scribe is a familiar figure in British narratives of the
region, from TE Lawrence to Rory Stewart. Ackerman fits easily into
this tradition ... The book shows what it is like to be in the
middle of it all - particularly for a young, open-minded and
quietly idealistic American.
*The Telegraph*
It is a rare writer who is not afraid to deal with the toughest
conflicts, ask the hardest questions, show the darkest side of even
heroes, and still manage to renew our faith in humanity.
Elliot Ackerman was a young Marine Corps officer during the battle
of Fallujah in 2004. I was an embedded journalist with his unit,
which lost 20 men in the first week of fighting. I remember him as
clever, direct and sometimes playfully ironic, all qualities on
display in his book about what he has seen of war, Places and
Names. His account of how he won a Silver Star is gripping, the
chaotic reality on the ground contrasting with the po-faced and
supremely uninformative official citation. His descriptions of
Syria, which he visited as a writer, were so painfully evocative
for me that I had to stop reading for a time. His vivid, sparse
prose bears comparison to that of Tim O'Brien in The Things They
Carried or Norman Lewis in Naples '44; Places and Names has the
same clear-eyed view of what war is.
*The Spectator*
Beautiful writing about combat and humanity and what it means to
'win' a war.
*NPR, All Things Considered*
Green on Blue is harrowing, brutal, and utterly absorbing. With
spare prose, Ackerman has spun a morally complex tale of revenge,
loyalty, and brotherly love ... a disturbing glimpse into one of
the world's most troubled regions.
This novel as a whole attests to Mr. Ackerman's breadth of
understanding - an understanding not just of the seasonal rhythms
of war in Afghanistan and the harsh, unforgiving beauty of that
land, not just of the hardships of being a soldier there, but a
bone-deep understanding of the toll that a seemingly endless war
has taken on ordinary Afghans who have known no other reality for
decades.
Elliot Ackerman has done something brave as a writer and even
braver as a soldier: He has touched, for real, the culture and soul
of his enemy
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