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2054 - A Novel
Elliot Ackerman, James Stavridis
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R715
R556
Discovery Miles 5 560
Save R159 (22%)
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A Times Political Book of the Year 2022 A powerful and revelatory
eyewitness account of the American collapse in Afghanistan, its
desperate endgame, and the war’s echoing legacy. Elliot Ackerman
left the American military ten years ago, but his time in
Afghanistan and Iraq with the Marines and, later, as a CIA
paramilitary officer marked him indelibly. When the Taliban began
to close in on Kabul in August of 2021 and the Afghan regime began
its death spiral, he found himself pulled back into the conflict.
The official evacuation process was a bureaucratic failure that led
to a humanitarian catastrophe. Ackerman was drawn into an impromptu
effort to arrange flights and negotiate with both Taliban and
American forces to secure the safe evacuation of hundreds. These
were desperate measures taken during a desperate end to America’s
longest war, but the success they achieved afforded a degree of
redemption: and, for Ackerman, a chance to reconcile his past with
his present. The Fifth Act is an astonishing human document that
brings the weight of twenty years of war to bear on a single week
at its bitter end. Using the dramatic rescue efforts in Kabul as
his lattice, Ackerman weaves in a personal history of the war's
long progress, beginning with the initial invasion in the months
after 9/11. It is a play in five acts with a tragic denouement. Any
reader who wants to understand what went wrong with the war’s
trajectory will find a trenchant accounting here. And yet The Fifth
Act is not an exercise in finger-pointing: it brings readers into
close contact with a remarkable group of characters, who fought the
war with courage and dedication, in good faith and at great
personal cost. Understanding combatants’ experiences and
sacrifices demands reservoirs of wisdom and the gifts of an
extraordinary storyteller. In Elliot Ackerman, this story has found
that author.The Fifth Act is a first draft of history that feels
like a timeless classic.
A Times Political Book of the Year 2022 A powerful and revelatory
eyewitness account of the American collapse in Afghanistan, its
desperate endgame, and the war's echoing legacy. Elliot Ackerman
left the American military ten years ago, but his time in
Afghanistan and Iraq with the Marines and, later, as a CIA
paramilitary officer marked him indelibly. When the Taliban began
to close in on Kabul in August of 2021 and the Afghan regime began
its death spiral, he found himself pulled back into the conflict.
The official evacuation process was a bureaucratic failure that led
to a humanitarian catastrophe. Ackerman was drawn into an impromptu
effort to arrange flights and negotiate with both Taliban and
American forces to secure the safe evacuation of hundreds. These
were desperate measures taken during a desperate end to America's
longest war, but the success they achieved afforded a degree of
redemption: and, for Ackerman, a chance to reconcile his past with
his present. The Fifth Act is an astonishing human document that
brings the weight of twenty years of war to bear on a single week
at its bitter end. Using the dramatic rescue efforts in Kabul as
his lattice, Ackerman weaves in a personal history of the war's
long progress, beginning with the initial invasion in the months
after 9/11. It is a play in five acts with a tragic denouement. Any
reader who wants to understand what went wrong with the war's
trajectory will find a trenchant accounting here. And yet The Fifth
Act is not an exercise in finger-pointing: it brings readers into
close contact with a remarkable group of characters, who fought the
war with courage and dedication, in good faith and at great
personal cost. Understanding combatants' experiences and sacrifices
demands reservoirs of wisdom and the gifts of an extraordinary
storyteller. In Elliot Ackerman, this story has found that
author.The Fifth Act is a first draft of history that feels like a
timeless classic.
"A Meteor of Intelligent Substance" "Something was Missing in our
Culture, and Here It Is" Liberties - A Journal of Culture and
Politics features new essays and poetry from some of the world's
best writers and artists to inspire and impact the intellectual and
creative lifeblood of our current culture and today's politics.
This summer issue of Liberties includes: Elliot Ackerman on
Veterans Are Not Victims; Durs Grunbein on Fascism and the Writer;
R.B. Kitaj's Three Tales; Thomas Chatterton Williams on The
Blessings of Assimilation; Anita Shapira on The Fall of Israel's
House of Labor; Sally Satel on Woke Medicine; Matthew Stephenson On
Corruption's Honey and Poison; Helen Vender on Wallace Stevens;
David Haziza on Illusions of Immunity; Paul Berman on the Library
of America; Clara Collier's nostalgia for strong women in film;
Michael Kimmage on American Inquisitions; Leon Wieseltier (editor)
on the high price of Stoicism; Celeste Marcus (managing editor) on
a Native American Tragedy; and new poetry from Adam Zagajewski,
A.E. Stallings, and Peg Boyers.
One of NPR's Best Books of 2019 "Lyrical . . . A thoughtful
perspective on America's role overseas." -Washington Post 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. "War hath determined
us." -John Milton, Paradise Lost Toward the beginning of Places and
Names, 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 operation 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 places 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 question 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 remarkable 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 combat 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 story
about the terrible lure of combat and a brilliant meditation on the
larger 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.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BRITISH ARMY MILITARY BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD
2020 'A superb, unique, and unforgettable story of war and death,
fear and cruelty, above all the horrors and allure of combat' Simon
Sebag Montefiore '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, author of The
Fall of Baghdad An astonishing account of the nature of war from
acclaimed novelist and decorated former US marine Elliot Ackerman
In a refugee camp in southern Turkey, Elliot Ackerman sits across
the table from Abu Hassar, who fought for Al Qaeda in Iraq and has
murky connections to the Islamic State. At first, Ackerman pretends
to have been a journalist during the Iraq War, but after he
establishes a rapport with Abu Hassar, he reveals that in fact he
was a Marine. The two men then compare their fighting experiences
in the Middle East, discovering they had shadowed each other for
some time: a realisation that brings them to a strange kind of
intimacy. Elliot Ackerman's extraordinary memoir explores the
events that led him to come to this refugee camp and what, unable
to forget his time in battle, he hoped to find there. Moving
between his recent time on the ground as a journalist in Syria and
his Marine deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, he creates a work
of astonishing atmospheric pressure, one which blends the American
experience with the perspectives and stories of the Arab world, and
draws a line between them. At once an intensely personal book about
the terrible lure of combat and a brilliant meditation on the
meaning of the past two decades of strife for the region and the
world, Places and Names bids to take its place among our greatest
books about modern war.
A gripping, morally complex debut novel, an astonishing feat of empathy and imagination about boys caught in a deadly conflict.
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