From a scholarly analysis and overview of the American Civil War, we move to an unmitigated on-the-ground account of the Iraq War--The Good Soldiers by Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post journalist David Finkel.Between January 2007 and June 2008, Finkel spent eight months with the United States Army soldiers of the 2-16 Infantry Battalion in Iraq as they took part in the campaign know as "the surge." What is the true story of the surge? And was it really a success? These are the questions Finkel's unflinching third-person narrative poses to its readers as it follows Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Kauzlarich and the men and women in his charge through the violence, tension, and loss of armed conflict and its aftermath. Finkel writes, "my intent was to document their corner of the war, without agenda. This book, then, is that corner, unshaded." Can it be argued that even if the conflict these soldiers were involved in was impossible to win, the soldiers who fought in it can be seen as successful?
Finkel's premise is that the lives of these good soldiers are intrinsically valuable, that their valor in facing and surviving this war is remarkable. He shows rather than tells readers what Drew Gilpin Faust calls, in This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, "the work of death," evoking the same questions and contradictions Faust argues were raised by the American Civil War: "the venerable problem of theodicy--of how and why God permits evil" (188); the "problem of the one and the many . . . How could the meaning of so many deaths be understood? And conversely, how could an individual's death continue to matter amid the loss of so many?" (262); and the resulting paradox of "[s]entimentality and irony [which] grew side by side in Americans' war-born consciousness" (264).
Many reviewers have written that The Good Soldiers will take its place as a classic story of war for all times. What do you think? We invite you to join the discussion: Tuesday, August 3, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, August 19, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; or here on the blog.
