Pumpkinflowers A Soldiers Story

“Matti Friedman’s haunting war memoir reminds one of Michael Herr’s unforgettable Vietnam memoir, Dispatches. It, too, is destined to become a classic text on the absurdities of war. Evocative, emotionally wrenching, and yet clear-eyed and dispassionate, Pumpkinflowers is a stunning achievement.” —Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer and New York Times bestselling author of The Good Spy
 
It was one small hilltop in a small, unnamed war in the late 1990s, but it would send out ripples still felt worldwide today. The hill, in Lebanon, was called the Pumpkin; flowers was the military code word for “casualties.” Award-winning writer Matti Friedman re-creates the harrowing experience of a band of young soldiers--the author among them--charged with holding this remote outpost, a task that changed them forever and foreshadowed the unwinnable conflicts the United States would soon confront in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

Part memoir, part reportage, part military history, this powerful narrative captures the birth of today’s chaotic Middle East and the rise of a twenty-first-century type of war in which there is never a clear victor, and media images can be as important as the battle itself. Raw and beautifully rendered, Pumpkinflowers will take its place among classic war narratives by George Orwell, Philip Caputo, and Vasily Grossman. It is an unflinching look at the way we conduct war today.

“Inspiring, heartbreaking, illuminating. Matti Friedman’s brilliant account of a forgotten war seen through the lens of a simple soldier is at once a coming-of-age story and an essential chronicle about how the twenty-first century was born.” —Yossi Klein Halevi, author of Like Dreamers

 

“Pumpkinflowers is a stunning achievement . . . Evocative, emotionally wrenching and yet clear-eyed and dispassionate, Matti Friedman’s haunting war memoir reminds one of Michael Herr’s unforgettable Vietnam memoir, Dispatches. It too is destined to become a classic text on the absurdities of war.” —Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and New York Times bestselling author of The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames

“Inspiring, heartbreaking, illuminating. Matti Friedman’s brilliant account of a forgotten war seen through the lens of a simple soldier is at once a coming of age story and an essential chronicle about how the 21st century was born.” —Yossi Klein Halevi, author of Like Dreamers

A book about young men transformed by war, written by a veteran whose dazzling literary gifts gripped my attention from the first page to the last. The Wall Street Journal

Friedman s sober and striking new memoir . . . is] on a par with Tim O Brien s The Things They Carried -- its Israeli analog. The New York Times Book Review

It was just one small hilltop in a small, unnamed war in the late 1990s, but it would send out ripples that are still felt worldwide today. The hill, in Lebanon, was called the Pumpkin; flowers was the military code word for casualties. Award-winning writer Matti Friedman re-creates the harrowing experience of a band of young Israeli soldiers charged with holding this remote outpost, a task that would change them forever, wound the country in ways large and small, and foreshadow the unwinnable conflicts the United States would soon confront in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.

Pumpkinflowers is a reckoning by one of those young soldiers now grown into a remarkable writer. Part memoir, part reportage, part history, Friedman s powerful narrative captures the birth of today s chaotic Middle East and the rise of a twenty-first-century type of war in which there is never a clear victor and media images can be as important as the battle itself.

Raw and beautifully rendered, Pumpkinflowers will take its place among classic war narratives by George Orwell, Philip Caputo, and Tim O Brien. It is an unflinching look at the way we conduct war today."

From a celebrated, award-winning writer comes the true story of a band of young soldiers, the author among them, charged with holding one remote outpost in Lebanon, a task that changed them forever and foreshadowed today’s unwinnable conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
 
It was small hilltop in a small, unnamed war in the late 1990s, but it would send out ripples that continue to emanate worldwide today. The hill was called the Pumpkin; flowers was the military code word for “casualties.” Friedman’s visceral narrative re-creates harrowing wartime experiences in a work that is part frontlines memoir, part journalistic reporting, part military history.

The years in question were pivotal ones, and not just for Israel. They saw the perfection of a type of warfare that would eventually be exported to Afghanistan and Iraq. The new twenty-first-century war is one in which there is never any clear victor, and not enough lives are lost to rally the public against it. Eventually Israel would come to realize that theirs was a losing proposition and pull out—as would the United States in similar conflicts around the globe. But, of course, by then these soldiers—those who had survived—and the country had been wounded in ways large and small.

Raw, powerful, beautifully rendered, the book will take its place among classic war stories such as those by George Orwell, Philip Caputo, and Vasily Grossman. Pumpkinflowers is an unflinching look at the way we conduct war today.

Matti Friedman’s first book, The Aleppo Codex, won the Sami Rohr Prize, the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal, and the Canadian Jewish Book Award. It was selected as one of Booklist’s top ten religion and spirituality titles in 2013 and received second place for the Religion Newswriters Association’s 2013 nonfiction religion book of the year. The book was published in Israel, Australia, Holland, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, Russia, and South Korea. Friedman has worked as a correspondent in the Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press news agency, where he specialized in religion and archaeology, and reported from Lebanon to Morocco, Cairo, Moscow, and Washington, D.C., as well as Israel, the Palestinian territories, and the Caucasus. In addition to the AP, his work has appeared in the Atlantic and the New York Times, among other publications. Friedman grew up in Toronto, moved to Israel as a teenager, and served three years in the Israeli military. Today he lives in Jerusalem with his wife and three children. He lectures frequently in Israel, the United Kingdom, and the United States.