Boston Book Festival 2019

A combat veteran turned journalist tells a powerful story of war, revolution, and returning to the streets of conflict. A National Book Award finalist, journalist, novelist, and decorated Marine, Elliot Ackerman has reckoned with the horrors of war from many angles. He has guided fellow Marines through brutal urban combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, interviewed Syrian activists about their failed revolution, and sat down with a former al-Qaeda member in Iraq to discuss the future of the Middle East. Ackerman will sit down with the Christian Science Monitor’s Martin Kuz, himself a journalist who covered Afghanistan, to discuss his unflinching memoir, Places and Names, which reckons with the nature of combat and the human cost of the wars in Iran, Afghanistan, and Syria. Twelve years after Ackerman fought in the Battle of Fallujah, he revisited the Iraqi city to find that little had changed. In the end, he discovered that returning to the region where he fought his war offered no closure. Yet the candid and at times devastating stories he collects offer a unique, human view of the past two decades of strife in the Middle East. Prepare for a deeply personal discussion about America’s modern wars. Sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor.