Pumpkinflowers

You might pass by this book with a funny title about a forgotten episode in a region that brings more terrible news every day, but don't. If "Orwellian" were a term not of horror but praise—meaning a book about war with the clarity, irony, and level-headed passion of Orwell's Homage to Catalonia—I would use it to describe Friedman's book of recollection and reporting about his Israeli army outpost in occupied Lebanon twenty years ago. It's a timeless story, precisely because it's rooted so firmly in a time and a place: that moment "between Appetite for Destruction and Nevermind," when a war that seemed like it was ending was in fact just beginning.