Vendor
	Liepman Literary Agency Marc Koralnik
Original language
English
Weblink
http://mattifriedman.com/

PUMPKINFLOWERS

Matti Friedman

PUMPKINFLOWERS is the true story of a small group of young soldiers, including the author, sent to hold an isolated hilltop in hostile territory and changed forever by the experience.

Matti Friedman's second work of nonfiction is about growing up and coming to terms with a world of complexity and contradiction. It recounts dramatic but otherwise forgotten events during the 1990s at the Pumpkin, a small military outpost in Lebanon. The book traces the lives of young men who come of age against the backdrop of a bewildering and changing Middle East, and who pass from one millennium to another. In the spirit of George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, PUMPKINFLOWERS is also a brilliant writer's effort to make sense of a conflict in which he took part and to assess its importance in history not only as a force that shaped a generation of young Israelis but also as a paradigm for all of the contemporary Middle East wars. Told with sensitivity not only to tragedy but also to the bizarre and even comic sides of conflict, PUMPKINFLOWERS represents a new generation of nonfiction writing from Israel, and a new voice from a country often discussed but rarely understood.
Friedman's first book, The Aleppo Codex: In Pursuit of One of the World's Most Coveted, Sacred, and Mysterious Books, won the 2014 Sami Rohr Prize, the ALA's Sophie Brody Medal, and the Canadian Jewish Book Award for history, and was a finalist for the Religion Newswriters Association book award. It has been translated into eight languages.

Available products
Book Published 2016-05-03 by Algonquin

Comments

Interview: Fallen troops, a forgotten hilltop and failed peace talks

#8 Best Books of the Year 2016

"Powerful account of youthful Israelis maturing, fighting, and dying at a forgotten Lebanon outpost. In this limber, deceptively sparse take on the Middle East's tightening spiral of violence, Friedman (The Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible, 2012) combines military history and personal experience on and off the line in deft, observant prose. The narrative is reminiscent of novels by Denis Johnson and Robert Stone, linking combat's violent absurdity to the traumatized perspectives of individual participants....A haunting yet wry tale of young people at war, cursed by political forces beyond their control, that can stand alongside the best narrative nonfiction coming out of Afghanistan and Iraq."

Citic

fast and engaging A compelling war memoir containing elements of terror, observation, boredom, and grim (at times absurd) humor. This is an excellent read..."

Writing out of a surprising sense of gratitude, Friedman gives thanks for what he learned by serving in the late 1990s as an Israeli soldier assigned to a vulnerable hilltop fortress in Lebanon called the Pumpkin the Pumpkin repeatedly exposed realities hidden behind conventional boundaries Readers marvel, for instance, at how battlefield events dissolve beneath the illusion of media images captured by a Hezbollah cameraman... Even the hard division pitting Israeli against Arab softens A compellingly narrative, freighted with explosive geopolitical implications. Bryce Christensen, Booklist (starred review)

A compelling narrative, freighted with explosive geopolitical implications.

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"A truly fine war memoir and Pumpkinflowers is certainly one almost always shows just how disorienting and ambiguous combat can be." Sober and striking on par with Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried its Israeli analog. Read more...

"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" phenomenal extremely moving Read more...

[T]he book is remarkably educational and heartfelt: Friedman's experiences provide a critical historical perspective on the changing climate of war in the Middle East, shifting from short official conflicts into longer unwinnable wars full of guerilla tactics and the deliberate creation of media narratives and images. His lyrical writing, attention to detail, and personal honesty draw the reader into empathy along with understanding. Friedman's memoir deserves wide readership.

"Pumpkinflowers is a stunning achievement, a beautifully written account of a young soldier's experience in Israel's endless war with Lebanon. 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 is a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and the author most recently of The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames.