10 Riveting Reads About the Iraq War

"The horror of war has the weird ability to produce moving and conflicted works of literary art, as writers work through the best and worst of human emotion to come to grips with what they’ve seen, heard, and experienced. Novels have played a major role — the Civil War gave us The Red Badge of Courage; World War I gave us All Quiet on the Western Front — but works of on-the-ground reporting like the Vietnam-era Dispatches and The Things They Carried offer readers an immediacy and reality different from that found in fictional works or the nightly news. The current war in Iraq is no different, having inspired dozens of worthy titles since the 2003 invasion. The titles on this list are jaw-dropping in their honest and frank depiction of the politics and battles involved in the Iraq War (with some examining Afghanistan, as well), and they offer a variety of eye-opening viewpoints that bring home the complexity and brutality of war. For anyone who cares about what’s happening in the country today, they’re required reading."
General Studies Degree