Utah Valley CVB

Other Dates and Authors  

 

David Finkel, author of “The Good Soldiers”

 

In his most recent title, “The Good Soldiers,” Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter David Finkel vividly chronicles the extraordinary circumstances of modern combathe experienced first hand between January 2007 and June 2008, when he spentfifteen months with a battalion of 800 U.S. Army soldiers as they carried out “the surge” and worked to secure a volatile area of Baghdad. Touted in the headlines as a success story, Finkel’s account is a day to day report of what these soldiers experienced, the harrowing truth of war. Its honest depiction of the reality of war shines a spotlight on the ever widening gap between media headlines and reality, the PR war and the real war. The soldiers fighting the good fight are no longer nameless faces, but now leap to life. They are real people with real lives, real hopes, dreams, fears. It is this portrait of the human condition put to extreme tests that make Finkel’s book so compelling. It transcends the politics of war to give a truthful and forthright portrayal of the cost war exacts from us -- perhaps man’s most costly addiction of all. Finkel is currently assigned to the national Washington Post staff as an enterprise reporter, and has previously worked for the Post’s foreign staff division.