Review and Book List for the Iraq & Afghan Wars

Michio Kakutani has published an interesting round-up in the New York Times of recent reportage, memoirs and fiction about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Human Costs of the Forever Wars, Enough to Fill a Bookshelf, accompanied by, A Reading List of Modern War Stories.

Even as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan morph into shapeless struggles with no clear ends in sight, they have given birth to an extraordinary outpouring of writing that tries to make sense of it all: journalism that has unraveled the back story of how and why America went to war, and also a profusion of stories, novels, memoirs and poems that testify to the day-to-day realities and to the wars’ ever-unspooling human costs.

 The reading list is not exhaustive, but would make a good start for a library display.  In my library, war displays tend to appear twice a year, for Memorial Day and Veterans Day.  This past summer we put up a special display for the one-hundredth anniversary of World War I, which moved pretty well.  But I am not sure how an Iraq & Afghan Wars display would be received.

I struggled over whether, and then how, to post these links, but they were clearly good material.  And the books themselves delineate better that I ever could the tragedy of these wars.  Would our readers pick them up?

I remember the time we tried a display on some anniversary of the 9/11 World Trade Center attack.  I don't think a single book was checked out.