‘This is the finest book yet written on the platoon-level combat of the Iraq war ... Unforgettable — raw, moving, and rendered with literary control ... No one who reads this book will soon forget its imagery, words, or characters.’
Steve Coll, author of Ghost Wars
‘This is the best account I have read of the life of one unit in the Iraq war. It is closely observed, carefully recorded and beautifully written. David Finkel doesn’t just take you into the lives of our soldiers, he takes you deep into their nightmares.’
Thomas E. Ricks, author of Fiasco and The Gamble
‘From a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer at the height of his powers comes an incandescent and profoundly moving book: powerful, intense, enraging. This may be the best book on war since the Iliad.’
Geraldine Brooks, author of People of the Book
‘Brilliant, heartbreaking, deeply true. The Good Soldiers offers the most intimate view of life and death in a 21st-century combat unit I have ever read. Unsparing, unflinching, and, at times, unbearable.’
Rick Atkinson, author of In the Company of Soldiers
‘David Finkel has written the most unforgettable book of the Iraq war, a masterpiece that will far outlast the fighting. Moving through his chapters is the closest thing to being there.’
David Maraniss, author of They Marched Into Sunlight
‘In his powerful account of one Army battalion’s struggle to stanch the violence roiling several neighborhoods in Baghdad, David Finkel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter, offers a grunt-level narrative of the blood, guts, heroism, and tortured logic that sustained the escalation of troops known as “the surge’’ between 2007 and 2008 ... What really distinguishes The Good Soldiers from other accounts of the war in Iraq is how Finkel compares the rhetoric with the realities of the conflict, showing us with gritty detail rather than opining from some ideological perch.’
David Abel, The Boston Globe
‘[A] superb and terrifying account.’
Geoff Pevere, Toronto Star
‘I have read hundreds of books about war and almost two dozen books about the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Most of them affected me. But none has affected me as deeply as The Good Soldiers.’
Kansas City Star
‘I've just finished a remarkable book called The Good Soldiers, by David Finkel. It is the best grunt's-eye view of the war in Iraq that I've read; certainly, it's the best written.’
Joe Klein, Time magazine
‘This is a wonderfully honest and brutally frank account of the war in Iraq … The book strips the soldiers back to their human core and confronts their humanity and the brutality of modern-day combat in frightening detail.’
Ian McPhedran, Daily Telegraph
‘Finkel's account … is riveting, honest and bloodied. The fast-paced, yet often understated, narrative of his book The Good Soldiers creates the sense of a mission flying by the seat of its pants — with Finkel in the midst of the terror.’
Simon Mann, The Sydney Morning Herald
‘An extremely fluent and vivid, and compulsively readable, piece of work.’
Owen Richardson, The Age
‘Pulitzer prize-winning journalist David Finkel spent eight months embedded with the 2-16, and his outstanding new book, The Good Soldiers, chronicles their victories, debacles, endurance and steady psychological disintegration.
The pedigree for this book stretches from ancient Greeks such as Thucydides and Xenophon through to recent accounts of the Long War on Terror such as Evan Wright's Kill Generation and Dexter Filkins's The Forever War. But Finkel's use of the novelistic techniques of 1960s New Journalism links The Good Soldiers to Michael Herr's celebrated memoir of his days as a Vietnam War correspondent, Dispatches, and to Tom Wolfe's magisterial nonfiction novel about the pre-Apollo astronauts, The Right Stuff.’
Jose Borghino, Weekend Australian
‘The Good Soldiers is one of the most harrowing and compelling war books of this generation. It is almost certainly the best book written on the Iraq war because it is the only one that takes us deep into the lives of the soldiers themselves as they try to retake the streets of Baghdad.’
Cameron Stewart, The Weekend Australian
‘Finkel's lens has the dispassion of the journalist but the focus of someone who has been allowed to be intimate with the rawest of emotions in the rawest of times. The Good Soldiers will have value as a document of one small aspect of the surge, but it also should stand on its own as a valuable piece of combat literature beyond the Iraq War.’
Mark Brunswick, Minneapolis Star Tribune
‘The Good Soldiers by David Finkel is absolutely riveting. This Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter from The Washington Post spent eight months in Iraq during the much-ballyhooed "surge," with the young men in an infantry platoon that was sent to a particularly violent part of Baghdad. These "good soldiers" of the title arrived in the war zone filled with determination to make a difference. Fifteen months later, those who were still whole came home forever changed. Others were killed, and in the most heartbreaking parts of this story we see what happened to those soldiers who were maimed by roadside bombs. This book is simply superb, written from a grunt's-eye perspective of this war, a perspective far different than that of the policymakers in Washington, the theoreticians and the generals you see on TV.’
Ron Smith, The Baltimore Sun
‘The most impressive piece of literary journalism I've read since ... hmmm ... maybe David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb. I think this book is gonna last. There will be inevitable comparisons by reviewers to Michael Herr's Dispatches. The reporting is detailed and intrepid; the writing is exquisite.’
The Washington Post’s Achenblog
‘Finkel's keen firsthand reportage, its grit and impact only heightened by the literary polish of his prose, gives us one of the best accounts yet of the American experience in Iraq.’
Publishers Weekly, starred review
‘The most honest, most painful, and most brilliantly rendered account of modern war I've ever read.’
Fortune Magazine
‘When President George W. Bush ordered the 2007 surge that stepped up the war in Iraq, the evening news gave us statistics (soldiers deployed, suicide bombs detonated) and hopeful or pessimistic reports on the rise and ebb of violence. By contrast, David Finkel's The Good Soldiers could hardly be more specific, more up close and personal.’
O, The Oprah Magazine
‘This is not only the best non-fiction book I've read this year, but one of the best I have ever read. It was riveting, unputdownable journalism at its very finest. David Finkel, a Pulitzer Prize winning Washington Post journalist, spent the best part of a year with a US army unit sent to Iraq at the very beginning of the surge. It makes no judgment on the merits of the surge as a policy; it simply tells the soldiers' stories. A masterpiece.’
Leigh Sales, presenter of ABC-TV's 'Lateline'
‘Not since Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried has there been such a searing, unembellished and unforgettable look at war as David Finkel's The Good Soldiers, a journal-like account of 15 months spent with the 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment of the 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, aka the 2-16, aka the "Rangers," in a little slice of vicious hell in Baghdad that everyone, even generals, avoids visiting if they can ... The whole damn book is this damn good, and it makes you feel as never before the waste and grief that marks the human addiction to war. If Finkel doesn't snag his second Pulitizer — this one for a book instead of newspaper articles — then there is no justice in this world.’
Daily Kos
‘Eschewing moral judgment, policy proposals and military techno-babble, Finkel writes concisely and vividly about trauma and regret, leaving us defenseless against the steadily accruing collateral damage of combat. This is not a new story. Still, to borrow the first sentence of the Ford Madox Ford novel whose title Finkel's reprises, this is the saddest story I have ever heard. Amid the protracted debate about troop deployments in Afghanistan that has considered seemingly every voice but that of the soldiers, The Good Soldiers offers a searing reminder of the human cost of escalation.’
Akiva Gottleib, The Nation
‘Extremely confronting ... his account of the terrible injuries suffered by the men is horrifying but deeply moving at the same time ... David Finkel's superb and highly-acclaimed book deserves to be widely read and is a fitting tribute to these brave ‘good soldiers’’.
Australian Defence Magazine
‘David Finkel's The Good Soldiers is a brilliant piece of long-form journalism but importantly it captures more than the sound and fury of war. There are moments of quiet, moments of intense reflection, moments of wondering and yearning and, yes, plenty of times where destruction is the only word.’
Peter Veness, Sunday Canberra Times
‘Perhaps the most confronting book written on the Iraq war ... it is unflinching in its depiction of the violence and stress without glorifying or excusing its subjects.’
Adelaide Advertiser
‘In April 2007, President George W. Bush announced the US military's new strategy for securing Iraq, which became known as the Surge. Young, patriotic and optimistic infantry soldiers of the 2-16 Battalion, nicknamed the Rangers, were about to be deployed to a particularly dangerous area in Baghdad. Their average age was 19, the youngest 17. Author David Finkel, an editor at The Washington Post, follows them into battle ... These young men undoubtedly are good soldiers and, should you have the courage to read this excellent book, they will break your heart.’
Cheryl Jorgensen, Courier Mail
‘In January 2007 George W Bush sent more troops to Iraq in a desperate attempt to stave off a loss. It became known as the surge. Washington Post journalist Finkel travelled with an infantry battalion sent over to take part in the surge and, in The Good Soldiers, he brilliantly chronicles their 15 months in Iraq. Finkel deftly captures the fear, futility and grim humour of a group of young men who face the risk of being killed every day. It's a gripping, fascinating and occasionally gruesome account of what can happen to soldiers both during a war and afterwards. Some of the most harrowing parts are those in which Finkel details the battles fought by wounded soldiers and their families when they return home. It's a masterpiece.’
Glen Humphries, Illawarra Mercury
‘That war is hell is not a new concept. However, David Finkel's powerful book about an American battalion in the Iraqi surge of 2007 gives the truism a raw force ... The Good Soldiers is a work of masterly reporting by a sensitive yet unsentimental writer. I suspect it will be judged one of the best books about Iraq and the cost of war to its participants.’
Martin van Beynen, Weekend Press
‘The Good Soldiers is the best book I have read on the Iraq War.’
Gordon Traill, The Australian Peacekeeper and Peacemaker Veterans' Association
‘A profoundly disturbing portrait of war ... This book was hard to put down, but the futility, despair and horror it documents is even harder to forget.’
Matt Rilkoff, Taranaki Daily News
