Pumpkinflowers
An Israeli Soldier's Story
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4.6 • 9 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From an award-winning Canadian-Israeli 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 recreates 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. 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, like the works of Jon Krakauer and Sebastian Junger, at the way we conduct war today.
From the Hardcover edition.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This memoir lifts its pretty title from an awful reality. The Pumpkin was an outpost in Lebanon where Matti Friedman fought Hezbollah in the ’90s alongside fellow Israeli soldiers; “flowers” was army jargon for casualties. Pumpkinflowers vigilantly exposes the contrasts and contradictions of war: days of tedium punctured by frenetic activity, a security zone that took more lives than it saved. But the book reaches beyond a harrowing, adrenaline-spiked account of battle. Friedman returns to Lebanon in 2002, and his civilian travelogue—as he meets locals who are amiable yet brimming with anti-Semitism—is a chilling coda.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Friedman, an Israeli journalist and writer, recounts the history of a hilltop bunker in southern Lebanon that was held by the Israeli army during the 1990s, beginning with the biography of a young soldier stationed there and transitioning into a memoir of his own time on the hill and his post-war visit as a tourist. Friedman's personal reflections alternate with a history of Israel's conflict in Lebanon, which he refers to as an unnamed and forgotten war, as he covers civilian sentiment, political responses to war and protest, and military strategy through the period. Though short, the 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.
