JRB review, Fall 2016

A Cedar of Lebanon Jewish Review of Books, Fall 2016 Amy Newman Smith Matti Friedman came home from Outpost Pumpkin, where he was based during his tour of duty in Lebanon, not long before Israel made the decision to withdraw from the “security zone.” “When the army pulled out of Lebanon, I was happy. I thought that the problem was …

“The Best Book About the Iraq War Isn’t About the Iraq War”

Douglas Ollivant, a retired US Army officer who served two tours in Iraq, and a former National Security Council Director and Senior Advisor in Afghanistan, wrote this review for War on the Rocks  (June 30, 2016): Iraq veterans finally have their book; a manuscript that really deals with the whole of the Iraq experience. After over a decade at war in …

Council on Foreign Relations book pick

The Council on Foreign Relations podcast picked Pumpkinflowers  as a recommended summer read, and CFR’s Bob McMahon, James Lindsay, and Elizabeth Saunders discussed the book on the June 16 podcast. Listen to it here.  

Amazon Top 20 of 2016 (So Far)

June 22, 2016 “Pumpkinflowers” has been chosen as one of Amazon’s top 20 books of the year so far. It’s also included in the top 20 books in the History and Biography/Memoir categories. There are lots of great books on the list, which you can see here in a report from Marketwatch. Amazon describes “Pumpkinflowers” as follows: “Named after an infamous …

Prospect review (UK)

By Ben Judah June 16, 2016 The Hebrew of the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) is very different from the kind I was taught at synagogue. Wounded soldiers are “flowers.” Dead soldiers are “oleanders,” “their dicks were broken.” “Lebanon,” for the Israeli writer Matti Friedman’s generation, means not just a country—but also the muddied experience of their youth as military conscripts. …

Christian Science Monitor review

By David Holahan May 4, 2014 Matti Friedman, author of Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story, was there at the beginning, in 1998, fighting for Israel in the non-war against the non-state fighters of Hezbollah in ungoverned south Lebanon. It was, in his telling, the beginning of much of what is happening in the Middle East (and beyond) today: unending conflict with …

Haaretz review

By Ilene Prusher May 23, 2016 A good war memoir never makes war look glamorous. Rather, it puts you in the shoes of the soldier or civilian at those incredible moments when life hangs by a thread, unpacks a few of the conflicting political forces at play and, ultimately, breaks your heart. It must, because you meet characters who will …

Israel’s Prophetic War (Wall Street Journal review)

By Bret Stephens May 6, 2016 From 1985 to 2000, the Israeli military occupied an 11-mile-deep “security zone” in southern Lebanon, in an effort to prevent the area from becoming a staging ground for attacks by Hezbollah into Israel itself. Some 250 Israeli soldiers were killed fighting in the zone and another 840 were injured—numbers that, for a country of …

Matti Friedman’s ‘Pumpkinflowers’ (New York Times review, May 3, 2016)

By Gal Beckerman Israel, like America, is an idea, not just a place. As a result, it has been subjected to much metaphorical thinking — it is a refuge, a beacon, a start-up company, an unlikely flower blooming in an unforgiving desert. Since the Middle East’s descent into chaos following the Iraq war and the ­aftermath of the Arab Spring, …

New York Times review, April 24, 2016

Review: In ‘Pumpkinflowers,’ a New Style of Middle East Combat By Jennifer Senior, Books of the Times During the 1990s, Matti Friedman and his fellow Israeli soldiers fought in a string of conflicts that never collectively earned a name. These battles existed in historical parentheses, wedged between Israel’s first Lebanon War, in 1982, and its second, in 2006. But that …