America at war was the dominant theme for nonfiction nominees of this year’s National Book Awards, announced Wednesday.
The nominees are The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals, by Jane Mayer, a writer for The New Yorker; This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, by Drew Gilpin Faust; Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, by Annette Gordon-Reed, about Thomas Jefferson’s slave family; Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives, by Jim Sheeler; and The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order, by Joan Wickersham.
Other recent war-flavored books that have been critically well-regarded were not nominated, including The Forever War by New York Times correspondent Dexter Filkins.
The winners are to be announced Nov. 19.
To read more about the nominations, CLICK HERE (subscription may be required).
See the NYT slide show fro “Final Salute: CLICK HERE.
The Forever War by Dexter Filkins, a New York Times correspondent, details his eyewitness accounts of events in Afghanistan in the late 1990s to the U.S. invasion of Iraq starting in 2003.
Critics say Filkins brings a clear-eyed view that cuts through the fog of war, and few conflicts have been murkier than the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Review by Stacey Rae Brownlie in BookBrowse:
If there is any writer who can bring this convolution of conflicts, both in Afghanistan and Iraq, back to our attention, it is Dexter Filkins. Filkins is an award-winning reporter, a veteran foreign correspondent who is nearly fearless in his pursuit of human stories. He was one of a small group of journalists and aid workers who were in Afghanistan in the late 1990s. He returned to Afghanistan after the 2001 attacks, staying through much of 2002 and then moved to Iraq as the American invasion began in 2003. He stayed in Iraq for over three years, recording (in 561 notebooks), writing - and surviving. The Forever War gives us the opportunity to look over the shoulder of someone who has been there, who has spoken to nearly every segment of Afghani and Iraqi society and has witnessed the death, destruction, hope and absurdity of war ….
Filkins replies to a question: Why did you write The Forever War, and why did you choose that title?
Whenever I went home to the U.S., people would ask me: what’s it like over there? What does it feel like? What’s it like to be shot at? What’s it like to be woken up by a car bomb? What’s it like to sleep in a village with no electricity? How do you talk to a warlord? Hence my book: I want to show people what it feels like to be in Iraq and Afghanistan: the ambiguity, the heartbreak, the fear and the joy. It’s a visceral book, not really an intellectual one.
As for the title, I should say: the book makes no argument. It is very explicitly not a political book. The title, “The Forever War,” is more metaphor than literal truth. (At least I hope it is). The first chapter of the book takes place in 1998, at the Kabul Sports Stadium, at a public execution carried about by the Taliban on a Friday afternoon. It’s 2008 now, and we are still at war. I’ve expended much of my life’s energies in those wars. Many of us have. It already feels like forever, and it isn’t even over yet.
On Afghanistan:
It was a very strange time. The Taliban were so weird; it was like they were from another century, another galaxy. In those days I was just mystified by Afghanistan - what it was, where it was going. Any Westerner who was there - reporters or aid workers; we were about the only ones - felt exactly the same way. What the hell is this? Where is it going? We could tell things there were going bad, that they were headed toward some terrible end. We just knew; we could feel it. Once, I think it was in the summer of 2000 - I actually told my editors back home: “Something really bad is going to happen here.” But of course I didn’t know what. When the planes hit the towers on September 11, it all came together.
Former White House spokesman Scott McClellan’s critical look at the Bush administration, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, isn’t so much an expose as it is his version of events that we largely already knew about.
Anyone who reads the newspapers, newsmags or watches CNN already knows somebody at the White House outed Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA supervisor (Libby, Rove, Cheney, probably with Bush’s at least tacit approval); that the reasons given for going to war in Iraq were dubious at best (I believe outright phony); and that the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina was a disaster that compounded the natural disaster and exposed the administration’s inability to govern.
If the hurricanes of 1989 (Hugo – I was in South Carolina at the time) and 1992 (Andrew) taught us anything, it’s that FEMA needs effective planning and execution and is no place to be stowing away inept cronies. Except the people in charge forgot that lesson. It took images of misery in New Orleans to get most of America to take notice. If the 2004 election had been held in 2005, Bush would have lost badly. Even to Kerry! Although Bush may have Myanmar to thank for setting new lows in responsiveness to disaster.
Even as bad as things have gone – a five-year-occupancy with no end in sight, inept response to disaster and a struggling economy – almost one-third of Americans apparently think Bush is a pretty good president. That’s amazing.
What sets McClellan apart is he was a Texas Bushie, one of W’s loyalists. Considered by the Washington press corps to be a rather weak spokesman, McClellan is largely viewed as a little in over his head. One pundit describes his book as Revenge of the Nerd, payback for being pushed around by the likes of Rummy and Cheney and Rove.
And the White House’s response to his book was curious. Rather than deny the essentially undeniable, they said stuff like “That’s not the Scott we knew,” and “He’s in it for the money” (who isn’t?). I imagine they’re just hoping the issue will quietly die down. Hey, it’s hurricane season. Maybe we’ll get lucky!
Things are getting even nastier in Washington these days. Now ex-Bushies are turning on the Bush administration – this time it’s former White House spokesman Scott McClellen. His coming book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, is setting off tremors in the capital.
He’s been letting some excerpts slip out since last fall, but today he uncorked some doozies.
Five years ago, anyone who spoke in dissent of the war in Iraq was broadly painted as unpatriotic or worse, a dadgummed Liberal with a capital L. Now that 70 percent of America thinks the war was a mistake (30 percent refuse to acknowledge reality), it’s easy to disparage the Bush administration.
I take little comfort in knowing that in 2002 I said going in and toppling Saddam Hussein was a bad idea. But it was even worse than I thought. I thought they’d at least have enough sense to guard the borders!
I’m sure a lot of conservatives are disappointed, but they have to realize Bush 43 is not a true conservative. A true conservative doesn’t spend more than he earns. Cut-tax-and-spend is a recipe for disaster. The next two or three generations are going to pay for this administration’s screw-ups.
Richard Clark, another former Bush staffer who has been critical of the administration, but didn’t wait two years to pipe up, said the story sounds familiar.
“I think the difference with McClellan’s book is he’s now telling us something we all know — that the war with Iraq was a disastrous war [and] was sold with deception. It’s a little different when you say something as I did and a few other people did four or five years ago, when the war was popular and when we were unpopular for saying what we said.”
I can’t wait to see what the Bush apologists say next.
Dave Wilson is the Grand Pooh-Bah of Editorial Content at DelMio.com, a site developed by SunLit Communications LLC. He also is at times janitor, chauffeur, chief cook and bottle washer. Once upon a time he was a metro editor and copy editor at the Akron Beacon Journal. Send love letters and trash talk to dave.wilson@delmio.com. Or post a comment. Whatever.
Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy by Charlie Savage has won the 2008 New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. The award, given annually since 1987, rewards journalists who bring clarity and public attention to issue.
The Award includes a $15,000 cash prize.
From the New York Public Library’s press release quotes Savage:
“The Bush-Cheney administration’s systematic effort to expand presidential power — a push that originated not with 9/11 but rather with Cheney’s experiences in the Ford administration after Watergate and Vietnam — is the most successfully implemented policy of the current White House. It is also one of the least understood. I wrote this book to explain how the system of checks and balances devised by the founders is changing as ever more power is being concentrated in the hands of the president and his top advisers — be they Republicans or Democrats — and to tell the dramatic stories behind this movement,” said Savage. “My thanks to the NYPL Bernstein Award committee for helping to direct wider attention to this fundamental constitutional issue, which transcends partisan politics.”
Charlie Savage, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is a Washington correspondent for the Boston Globe.
The nominees are The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals, by Jane Mayer, a writer for The New Yorker; This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, by Drew Gilpin Faust; Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, by Annette Gordon-Reed, about Thomas Jefferson’s slave family; Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives, by Jim Sheeler; and The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order, by Joan Wickersham.
