My Life as a Foreign Country - Softcover

Turner, Brian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099578875 ISBN 13: 9780099578871

Publisher: Vintage, 2015

Synopsis

In 2003, Sergeant Brian Turner was at the head of a convoy of 3,500 US soldiers as they entered the Iraqi desert.

Now, still stalked by conflict, he retraces his war experience and meditates on the echoes between his story and those of generations of soldiers marching to battle before him.

Spanning pre-deployment to combat zone, World War I to Vietnam, boredom to bloodlust, roadside bombs to open mic nights, My Life as a Foreign Country asks what it means to be a soldier and a human being.
‘The most haunting book I read this year’
Irish Times

‘His shrapnel-like chapters come at you from all angles... Compulsive’
Guardian

‘Turner is a soldier with the soul of a poet’
Daily Telegraph

‘Wrathful, wry and incantatory’
Erica Wagner, New Statesman

‘Beautiful, electrifying and full of pain’
Washington Post

About this title

About the Author

Brian Turner is the director of the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College and the prize-winning author of two poetry collections about his seven years in the United States Army. He lives in Orlando, Florida.

Review

“[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.”
- Jen Percy, The New York Times Book Review

“Turner is...a poet, and he cannot help but see the world, even the world of combat, in terms of beauty, fragility and heartbreaking splendor.... [His] eloquent rendering illuminates both the shared space and the painful divide between poet and soldier, mission and memory, war and peace.”
- Roxana Robinson, Washington Post

“Turner is the rare soldier-writer who takes a deep interest in Iraqis―their language and literature, their past, their daily doings, their inner lives.”
- George Packer, The New Yorker

“My Life as a Foreign Country is brilliant and beautiful. It surely ranks with the best war memoirs I've ever encountered―a humane, heartbreaking, and expertly crafted work of literature.”
- Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried

“In Brian Turner's extraordinarily capable hands, language is war's undoing, in the sense that his words won't 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.”
- Mark Doty, author of Fire to Fire, winner of the National Book Award

“Turner's voice is prophetic, an eerie calm in the midst of calamity...Achingly, disturbingly, shockingly beautiful.”
- Nick Flynn, author of The Reenactments and The Ticking Is the Bomb

“A brilliant fever dream of war's 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.”
- Benjamin Busch, author of Dust to Dust

“A book...about the haunted past and a haunted man... A story of working through trauma, but above all it's a book about a man, a country, even a species beleaguered by a terrible attachment to war.”
- Tomas Hachard, NPR

“The psychological consequences of war are movingly portrayed... [a] standout.”
- Publishers Weekly

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0099578875
• ISBN 13: 9780099578871
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224