Places and Names : On War, Revolution and Returning - Elliot Ackerman

Places and Names

On War, Revolution and Returning

By: Elliot Ackerman

Paperback | 28 January 2021 | Edition Number 1

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An astonishing reckoning with the nature of war from a National Book Award-shortlisted novelist and decorated former US marine.

In a refugee camp in southern Turkey, Elliot Ackerman sits across the table from 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 he establishes a rapport with Abu Hassar, he reveals that in fact he was a Marine. Ackerman then draws the shape of the Euphrates River on a large piece of paper, and his one-time adversary joins him, filling in the map with the names and dates of where they saw fighting during the war. They discover they had shadowed each other for some time, a realisation that brings them to a strange kind of intimacy.

Elliot Ackerman's extraordinary memoir explores how he came to this refugee camp and what he hoped to find there. Moving between his recent experiences on the ground as a journalist in Syria and his Marine deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan, he creates a work of astonishing atmospheric pressure.

At once an intensely personal book about the terrible lure of combat and a brilliant meditation on the meaning of the past two decades of strife for America, the region and the world, Places and Names bids to take its place among our greatest books about modern war.

About the Author

Elliot Ackerman is the author of several novels including Dark at the Crossing, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and most recently Waiting for Eden. His writings appear in Esquire, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Magazine, among other publications, 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.
Industry Reviews
Elliot Ackerman's exceptional memoir is really a double memoir of his own experiences as a Marine and those of a Jihadist fighter he befriends in a refugee camp. The result is a superb, unique and unforgettable story of war and death, fear and cruelty, above all the horrors and allure of combat. Elliot Ackerman's voice scares me. It's a bit too close for comfort. He sees too much and he knows too much, and that makes him a great guide to today's posteverything Middle East. Read him at your own risk but ignore this book at your own peril.
Thomas E. Ricks, author of 'Making the Corps,' 'Fiasco,' and 'Churchill and Orwell'

Rare is the writer who can illuminate either the experience of the individual or the larger context of the times in which we live. Elliot Ackerman manages to do both. He is as adept at describing the strange cocktail of emotions that accompany the moments preceding combat as he is unraveling the Gordian Knot of contemporary geopolitics. That he does so in the graceful, lucid prose fans of his fiction have come to admire is even more remarkable. Places and Names is an extraordinarily beautiful and insightful work of memoir and journalism by a writer who deserves to be read widely.
Kevin Powers

How often does one encounter a novel as perfectly shaped, as fresh, as subtle and as explosive as this? I couldn't turn away from Elliot Ackerman's latest taut wonder, and when I got to the final page, I wanted to start all over again, in the light of the haunting last words. Patiently, and unflinchingly, Ackerman is becoming one of the great poet laureates of America's tragic adventurism across the globe.
Pico Iyer

When I finished Elliot Ackerman's Places and Names my copy was covered with bracketed paragraphs and underlined phrases. There is no surer indicator of a book filled with insight and good writing. Ackerman's honest searching to come to terms with his war experience helped me better understand my own. This book is a gift that should be shared with every American who helped pay for people like Ackerman to fight their wars for them.
Karl Marlantes, prizewinning author of Matterhorn and Deep River

Places and Names is its own profile in courage: the story of how a Marine turned reporter struggled with the polemics of desolation in the Middle East. Elliot Ackerman is a man of both action and thought, and his book is closely observed, rigorously lived, and clarifying for all of us who have not understood how U.S. policy in the Islamic world went so terribly wrong.
Andrew Solomon, author of 'Far and Away', 'Far From the Tree', and 'The Noonday Demon'

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