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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
Elliot Ackerman is the author of The Fifth Act, Places and Names, 2034 , Red Dress In Black and White, Waiting for Eden, Dark at the Crossing, and Green on Blue. His books have been nominated for the National Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal in both fiction and non-fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize among others. His writing often appears in Esquire, The New Yorker, and The New York Times , and his stories have been included in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Travel Writing . He is both a former White House Fellow and Marine, and 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.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
"Wars are no longer punctuated by clear declarations of victory or defeat," writes journalist, novelist, and ex-Marine Ackerman (Dark at the Crossing) midway through this lyrical war memoir and consideration of American military interventions in the Middle East. Through a chance connection, Ackerman befriends Abu Hassar, an Iraqi who fought on many of the same battlegrounds he did--but for al-Qaeda. Through the lens of this unlikely relationship and another with the young Syrian activist Abed, Ackerman examines the scars etched on the landscape, its inhabitants, and those, like him, who came there to fight: for both his fellow Americans and Syrian democratic rebels, he writes, "our wars each devolved into disasters for the same reason: by trying to unleash sweeping change in the region, we created the conditions for extremists to rise." Memory continuously draws him back to the places they fought: "I am defined by a place I might return to someday, the idea that somewhere on my life's horizon is a time when I'll again walk those streets knowing my war is finished." He brings together a poetic sensibility (imbuing unforced significance into chess games, T-shirt slogans, and other happenstance details) and clear-eyed understanding of the political forces at work in the Middle East. That combination will appeal to fans of reflective, well-honed memoir, and those with an interest in geopolitics. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit. (June)
Booklist Review
In this searing, contemplative, and unforgettable memoir-in-essays, Ackerman, a National Book Award-nominated novelist (Dark at the Crossing, 2017) and former marine, considers his years of service from his current home in Istanbul. He begins with a discussion of the Syrian Civil War and introduces Abed, his close friend, whose life, hopes, and views are a central focus throughout. In subsequent pieces, Ackerman discusses such varied topics as the rise of the Islamic State (including an interview with a former jihadi), Kurdish history, the friends he lost while serving, the paradoxes of military service, and even his teenage skating years in London. Through memories and his present work as a journalist, Ackerman constantly revisits his traumas; for instance, the essay, A Summary of Action, which comments on the terse prose of his Silver Star award report, is an incredible re-creation of what he experienced in Fallujah. Deeply personal yet never losing sight of the big, historical reasons for recent events, this collection recalls Michael Herr's classic Dispatches (1977) as well as William T. Vollmann's voluminous ruminations on violence in Rising Up and Rising Down (2003), and is perhaps the finest writing about the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts that has been published to date.--Alexander Moran Copyright 2019 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Former Marine Ackerman (Dark at the Crossing) crafts his memoir in a unique and entertaining format. Rather than writing chronologically, he begins in the present day with his travels to Syria and Iraq. He befriends a man named Abed who saw the start of the democratic revolution in Syria and introduces Ackerman to another man named Abu Hassar, who was himself involved with ISIS. Hassar and Ackerman realize they were combatants on opposite sides of war, both dealing with the effects of the conflict, the deaths of friends, and the memories of harsh battles. Throughout, Ackerman goes back and forth between his visits to today's Syria and Iraq and his five tours of duty. The account contains many insights into the purpose of war and how it damages all parties involved. The bookend meeting with Hassar and the conclusion help to solidify the beauty of the work. VERDICT Any fan of Ackerman's previous novels (Waiting for Eden), memoirs on the Iraq or Afghanistan wars, and valuable outlooks on the nature of war and its combatants will find this phenomenal. [See Prepub Alert, 12/3/18.]-Jason L. Steagall, -formerly with Gateway Technical Coll. Lib., Elkhorn, WI © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Prologue: The Revolution Is Over, or The Music Will Live Forever | p. xv |
| The Triumph of Death (Summer 2013) | p. 1 |
| The Fourth War (Autumn 2013) | p. 12 |
| In Dara'a, a Spark and Fuel (Spring 2011) | p. 38 |
| Expatriates (Winter 2014) | p. 48 |
| A Prayer for Austin Tice (Winter 2014) | p. 70 |
| Black in the Rainbow, Bergdahl and the Whale (Summer 2014) | p. 80 |
| The Suleimani Photograph (Summer 2014) | p. 92 |
| Safe on the Southbank (Summer 2014) | p. 102 |
| No Friends but the Mountains (Autumn 2014) | p. 106 |
| Paradox (Autumn 2004) | p. 126 |
| What's Buried in the Devil's Mountain (Winter 2015) | p. 134 |
| My Last Movie Night (Spring 2011) | p. 144 |
| The Imitation Game at Tel Abyad (Summer 2015) | p. 154 |
| A Thousand Discords (Summer 2015) | p. 166 |
| A Swiss Wedding (Summer 2015) | p. 184 |
| Back to the City (Autumn 2016) | p. 190 |
| A Summary of Action (Epilogue) | p. 212 |