Pumpkinflowers

"Matti Friedman's haunting war memoir reminds one of Michael Herr's unforgettable Vietnam memoir, Dispatches. It, too, is destined to become a classic text on the absurdities of war. Evocative, emotionally wrenching, and yet clear-eyed and dispassionate, Pumpkinflowers is a stunning achievement." - Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and New York Times bestselling author of The Good Spy; "Inspiring, heartbreaking, illuminating." - Yossi Klein Halevi, author of Like Dreamers; "Riveting. Pumpkinflowers is both an historical jigsaw puzzle and an examination of Israel's fraught national identity." - Siobhan Fallon, author of You Know Where the Men Are Gone; "A haunting yet wry tale of young people at war, cursed by political forces beyond their control, that can stand alongside the best narrative nonfiction coming out of Afghanistan and Iraq." - Kirkus Reviews; "The collective portrait [of young Israeli soldiers] puts Pumpkinflowers on a par with Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried - its Israeli analog." - New York Times; "A book about young men transformed by war, written by a veteran whose dazzling literary gifts gripped my attention from the first page to the last." - Wall Street Journal; "Pumpkinflowers is a sad, lyrical book-proud and fierce on its own terms. Friedman's prose is elegant and concise, yet it is studded with gems from the Talmud and Torah that only a writer deeply learned in the Jewish tradition could offer. His memoirs of his time in the mist and the mountains of Lebanon are full of haunting insights into what it means to be a soldier. It will be remembered as a classic." - Prospect