The Fifth Act
America’s End in Afghanistan
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- $ 47.900,00
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- $ 47.900,00
Descripción editorial
A Times Political Book of the Year 2022
A powerful and revelatory eyewitness account of the American collapse in Afghanistan, its desperate endgame, and the war’s echoing legacy.
Elliot Ackerman left the American military ten years ago, but his time in Afghanistan and Iraq with the Marines and, later, as a CIA paramilitary officer marked him indelibly. When the Taliban began to close in on Kabul in August of 2021 and the Afghan regime began its death spiral, he found himself pulled back into the conflict. The official evacuation process was a bureaucratic failure that led to a humanitarian catastrophe. Ackerman was drawn into an impromptu effort to arrange flights and negotiate with both Taliban and American forces to secure the safe evacuation of hundreds. These were desperate measures taken during a desperate end to America’s longest war, but the success they achieved afforded a degree of redemption: and, for Ackerman, a chance to reconcile his past with his present.
The Fifth Act is an astonishing human document that brings the weight of twenty years of war to bear on a single week at its bitter end. Using the dramatic rescue efforts in Kabul as his lattice, Ackerman weaves in a personal history of the war's long progress, beginning with the initial invasion in the months after 9/11.
It is a play in five acts with a tragic denouement. Any reader who wants to understand what went wrong with the war’s trajectory will find a trenchant accounting here. And yet The Fifth Act is not an exercise in finger-pointing: it brings readers into close contact with a remarkable group of characters, who fought the war with courage and dedication, in good faith and at great personal cost. Understanding combatants’ experiences and sacrifices demands reservoirs of wisdom and the gifts of an extraordinary storyteller. In Elliot Ackerman, this story has found that author.The Fifth Act is a first draft of history that feels like a timeless classic.
About the author
ELLIOT ACKERMAN is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels 2034, Red Dress In Black and White, Waiting for Eden, Dark at the Crossing, and Green on Blue, as well as the memoir Places and Names: On War, Revolution and Returning. His books have been nominated for the National Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal in both fiction and nonfiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize among others. He is both a former White House Fellow and Marine, and served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. He divides his time between New York City and Washington, D.C.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A veteran ponders America's "harried withdrawal" from Afghanistan in this haunting memoir. Journalist and novelist Ackerman (Dark at the Crossing) served in Afghanistan as a Marine and CIA officer until 2011; here he recounts his efforts last summer during the Taliban's takeover of Kabul to help Afghans who worked with the U.S. to flee the country. It's a harrowing portrait of chaos and collapse: working mainly by text message from Italy, Ackerman—with the help of an improvised personal network of journalists, officials, and sympathetic Marine buddies—helped thread evacuees through a gauntlet of Taliban checkpoints, desperate crowds, and suspicious American sentinels to get to flights out of Kabul's besieged airport. The nerve-wracking operation frames his recollections of weathering firefights in Afghanistan, witnessing the deaths of comrades, and agonizing over dangerous missions to recover their bodies. Writing in evocative, gripping prose—"Blood, like spilled paint, stained the side of the hood and wheel well.... The major sat inside the RG-33, dazed like a prizefighter between rounds, clutching a radio handset he wasn't talking into"—Ackerman provides a clear-eyed indictment of America's failures in Afghanistan while paying homage to the soldiers who fought there. The result is a moving elegy for a blighted struggle. Photos.
