Matti Friedman

Harvard Book Store welcomes journalist and prize-winning author of The Aleppo Codex MATTI FRIEDMAN for a reading from his latest book, Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier's Story.

About Pumpkinflowers

It was just one small hilltop in a small, unnamed war in the late 1990s, but it would send out ripples that are still felt worldwide today. The hill, in Lebanon, was called the Pumpkin; flowers was the military code word for “casualties.” Award-winning writer Matti Friedman re-creates the harrowing experience of a band of young Israeli soldiers charged with holding this remote outpost, a task that would change them forever, wound the country in ways large and small, and foreshadow the unwinnable conflicts the United States would soon confront in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.

Pumpkinflowers is a reckoning by one of those young soldiers now grown into a remarkable writer. Part memoir, part reportage, part history, Friedman’s powerful narrative captures the birth of today’s chaotic Middle East and the rise of a twenty-first-century type of war in which there is never a clear victor and media images can be as important as the battle itself.

Raw and beautifully rendered, Pumpkinflowers will take its place among classic war narratives by George Orwell, Philip Caputo, and Tim O’Brien. It is an unflinching look at the way we conduct war today.

Praise

“Pumpkinflowers is a stunning achievement, a beautifully written account of a young soldier’s experience in Israel’s endless war with Lebanon. Evocative, emotionally wrenching and yet clear-eyed and dispassionate, Matti Friedman’s haunting war memoir reminds one of Michael Herr’s unforgettable Vietnam memoir, Dispatches. It too is destined to become a classic text on the absurdities of war.” —Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and New York Times bestselling author of The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames

"Pumpkinflowers is both an historical jigsaw puzzle and an examination of Israel’s fraught national identity. Friedman recounts an almost forgotten moment in Israel’s long entanglement with her neighbors, managing to illuminate the confusion at the heart of the conflict as well as chillingly echo America’s own slide into prolonged wars in the Middle East."  —Siobhan Fallon, author of You Know When the Men Are Gone