The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria

The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria

Janine Di Giovanni

My War Gone By, I Miss It So

Anthony Loyd · 334 pages

Nothing can prepare you for Anthony Loyd 's portrait of war. It is the story of the unspeakable terror and the visceral, ecstatic thrill of combat, and the lives and dreams laid to waste by the bloodiest conflict that Europe has witnessed since the Second World War. Born into a distinguished military family, Loyd was raised on the stories of his ancestors' exploits and grew up fascinated with war.

In the Hot Zone: One Man, One Year, Twenty Wars

Kevin Sites · 368 pages

Kevin Sites is a man on a mission. Venturing alone into the dark heart of war, armed with just a video camera, a digital camera, a laptop, and a satellite modem, the award-winning journalist covered virtually every major global hot spot as the first Internet correspondent for Yahoo! News. Beginning his journey with the anarchic chaos of Somalia in September 2005 and ending with the Israeli-Hezboll

And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

Richard Engel · 241 pages

"Based on two decades of reporting, NBC's chief foreign correspondent's riveting story of the Middle East revolutions, the Arab Spring, war, and terrorism seen up-close--sometimes dangerously so. When he was just twenty-three, a recent graduate of Stanford University, Richard Engel set off to Cairo with $2,000 and dreams of being a reporter. Shortly thereafter he was working freelance for Arab new

The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo

Joe Sacco · 112 pages

"How much does the nightly news cost? A carton of cigarettes maybe, or a pair of Levis. When shells are falling and Western journalism is the only game left in town "fixers" are the people who find war correspondents the human tragedies that make news editors happy. It's a dangerous occupation, a little amoral and a lot desperate." "Joe Sacco goes behind the scene of war correspondents to reveal t

The Forever War

Dexter Filkins · 376 pages

National Bestseller Winner of the National Book Critics Circle AwardA New York Times Book Review Best Book of the YearOne of the Best Books of the Year: New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Boston Globe, and TimeAn instant classic of war reporting, The Forever War is the definitive account of America's conflict with Islamic fundamentalism and a searing exploration of its

Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War

Peter Maass · 320 pages

The Bite of Mango

Mariatu Kamara, Susan McClelland · 216 pages

War Child: A Boy Soldier's Story

Emmanuel Jal, Megan Lloyd Davies · 262 pages

In the mid-1980s, Emmanuel Jal was a seven-year-old Sudanese boy, living in a small village. But as Sudan's civil war moved closer, his family moved again and again, seeking peace. Then, one terrible day, Jal was separated from his mother, and later learned she had been killed; his father Simon rose to become a powerful commander in the Christian Sudanese Liberation Army, fighting for the freedom

From Beirut to Jerusalem

Thomas L. Friedman · 560 pages

Examines Israeli-Palestinian relations, the PLO, Israeli politics, Lebanese factions, news reporting from the Middle East, and other issues of the Middle East.

First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers

Loung Ung · 256 pages

From a childhood survivor of the Camdodian genocide under the regime of Pol Pot, this is a riveting narrative of war crimes and desperate actions, the unnerving strength of a small girl and her family, and their triumph of spirit. One of seven children of a high-ranking government official, Loung Ung lived a privileged life in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh until the age of five. Then, in

When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman's Journey from War to Peace

Le Ly Hayslip, Jay Wurts · 368 pages

A Vietnamese girl caught between the North the South and the Americans. Later in life she returns to Vietnam to find her family and continuing distrust and fear. The book goes back and forth between the war years and her return as an American. A great book. One of my favorites.

13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened In Benghazi

Mitchell Zuckoff · 352 pages

The harrowing, true account from the brave men on the ground who fought back during the Battle of Benghazi. This book presents, for the first time ever, the true account of the events of September 11, 2012, when terrorists attacked the US State Department Special Mission Compound and a nearby CIA station called the Annex in Benghazi, Libya. A team of six American security operators fought to repel

Dispatches

Michael Herr · 260 pages

Written on the front lines in Vietnam, *Dispatches* became an immediate classic of war reportage when it was published in 1977. From its terrifying opening pages to its final eloquent words, *Dispatches* makes us see, in unforgettable and unflinching detail, the chaos and fervor of the war and the surreal insanity of life in that singular combat zone. Michael Herr’s unsparing, unorthodox retelling

The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945

Wladyslaw Szpilman · 224 pages

A Jewish pianist's real-life account of survival in World War II Warsaw. Separated in a mêlée, he fights to rejoin his family as they board the death train, but police block him. "Papa!" he cries. The father waves, "as if I were setting out into life and he was already greeting me from beyond the grave."

What Is the What

Dave Eggers · 475 pages

*What Is the What* is the epic novel based on the life of Valentino Achak Deng who, along with thousands of other children--the so-called Lost Boys--was forced to leave his village in Sudan at the age of seven and trek hundreds of miles by foot, pursued by militias, government bombers, and wild animals, crossing the deserts of three countries to find freedom. When he finally is resettled in the Un

Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War

Megan K. Stack · 257 pages

A shattering account of war and disillusionment from a young woman reporting from the front lines of the war on terror SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD.

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

Laura Hillenbrand · 514 pages

On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane’s bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Se

Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War

Evan Wright · 356 pages

They were called a generation without heroes. Then they were called upon to be heroes. Within hours of 9/11, America's war on terrorism fell to those like the twenty-three Marines of the First recon Battalion, the first generation dispatched into open-ended combat since Vietnam. They were a new pop-culture breed of American warrior unrecognizable to their forebears - soldiers raised on hip ho

Stringer: A Reporter's Journey in the Congo

Anjan Sundaram · 265 pages

A journalist who has reported from Africa and the Middle East presents a memoir about his life-threatening, disorienting year of self-discovery in one of the world's most conflicted nations in 2005-2006.

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq

Thomas E. Ricks · 487 pages

The definitive military chronicle of the Iraq war and a searing judgment on the strategic blindness with which America has conducted it, drawing on the accounts of senior military officers giving voice to their anger for the first time.Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post senior Pentagon correspondant Thomas E. Ricks's Fiasco is masterful and explosive reckoning with the planning and execution o

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

Ishmael Beah · 234 pages

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007) is a memoir written by Ishmael Beah, an author from Sierra Leone. The book is a firsthand account of Beah's time as a child soldier during the civil war in Sierra Leone (1990s). Beah was 12 years old when he fled his village after it was attacked by rebels, and he wandered the war-filled country until brainwashed by an army unit that forced him to u

Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone

Rajiv Chandrasekaran · 336 pages

An unprecedented account of life in Baghdad’s Green Zone, a walled-off enclave of towering plants, posh villas, and sparkling swimming pools that was the headquarters for the American occupation of Iraq.

Black Hawk Down

Mark Bowden · 486 pages

Late in the afternoon of Sunday, 3 October 1993, 140 elite US soldiers abseiled from helicopters into a teeming market neighbourhood in the heart of the city of Mogadishu, Somalia. Their mission was to abduct two top lieutenants of a Somali warlord and return to base. It was supposed to take them about an hour. Instead, they were pinned down through a long and terrible night in a hostile city,