My Life as a Foreign Country: A Memoir [Paperback]

Turner is the rare soldier-writer who takes a deep interest in Iraqistheir language and literature, their past, their daily doings, their inner lives.Turners voice is prophetic, an eerie calm in the midst of calamity&Achingly, disturbingly, shockingly beautiful.[A] praiseworthy example of how the empathetic imagination can function beautifully in nonfiction writing&Turner has a talent for amalgamating disparate experiences, especially between civilian and soldier, but also between history and the present&History can only be served by this kind of attention.?Man must look at what he has done. And Turner looks, brilliantly.A brilliant fever dream of wars surreality, its lastingness, its place in families and in the fate of nations. Each sentence has been carefully measured, weighed with loss and vitality, the hard-earned language of a survivor who has seen the world destroyed and written it back to life. This is a profound and beautiful work of art.Turners poetic gaze irradiates his world&[His] memoir is beautiful, electrifying and full of pain.In Brian Turners extraordinarily capable hands, language is wars undoing, in the sense that his words wont allow absurdity and terror to be anything less than real.?My Life as a Foreign Country?is lyrical and restless, both ironic and profoundly empathetic.Brian Turner has given us not so much a memoir as a meditation, rendered with grace and wit and wisdom. If you want to know what modern soldiers see when they look at their world, read this book.Moments of candor and existential longing break open to expose a world of truths&Brian Turner is a born storyteller.A book about these haunted countries and cities, about the haunted past and a haunted man. It haunts us, too, with the knowledge it impartsand then mocks our attempts to claim that we can ever fully understand that knowledge. In some ways [its] a story of working through trauma, but above all its a book about a man, a country, even a species belC¯