Ex Libris: 100+ Books to Read and Reread

by Michiko Kakutani

Dexter Filkins’s book The Forever War—based on his coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for The New York Times—delineates life in these combat zones with uncommon eloquence and insight. It’s a harrowing and urgent book that combines a reporter’s legwork with a tactile, novelistic understanding of the human sorrow and unbearableness of war. It gives us indelible snapshots of the young American soldiers who fought there and the Iraqis who knew they would have to go on living there long after the Americans had left. Filkins describes the momentary hope, when hundreds of Iraqis, dressed in their best clothes, crowded into the Fallujah Youth Center to attend an American-style caucus to choose representatives for the provincial councils, and he describes how the city soon became a stronghold of the insurgency, and would be left decimated by U.S.-led efforts to retake the city. He describes the incessant car bombings, the desperate civilians targeted by the insurgents, the wreckage of homes and entire neighborhoods by American bombings, the razor wire and blast walls people put up for protection, the lies told by Iraqi and American politicians. He introduces us to Khalid Hassan, a young Palestinian Iraqi who worked for the Times in Baghdad and who was shot and killed one day by a group of gunmen who pulled alongside his car; and Fakhri al-Qaisi, a Baghdad dentist, who was targeted by a Shiite death squad for being a Sunni fundamentalist, mistrusted by Sunni insurgents for...