Esquire magazine hailed the memoir as “the most extraordinary writing yet produced by a soldier of the Iraq war.” My War follows Buzzell, a bored twenty-six-year-old high school graduate from northern California, from his initial visit to a military recruiter through two years of service with the First Battalion, Twenty-third Regiment, of the U.S. Thompson and Allen Ginsberg, is fueled by an antiauthority, punk-rock attitude. Two stylized and uniquely organized standouts in this crowded field began their journeys to publication as Weblogs, or blogs- My War by Buzzell, whose received as many as ten thousand hits per day while he served in the Army in Iraq and Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog From Iraq (Feminist Press), a collection of anonymous blog posts poetically rendered by a young, educated, middle-class Iraqi woman.īuzzell’s My War, written in a style reminiscent of Hunter S. Army by Kayla Williams, published by Norton in September and The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier’s Account of the War in Iraq by John Crawford, published in August by Riverhead. Some of these include My War: Killing Time in Iraq by Colby Buzzell, published last month by Putnam Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. In recent months an unusually high number of soldier memoirs have been released by American publishers. The last few years have seen the publication of several notable memoirs, such as Who Killed Daniel Pearl? (Melville House, 2003), the international best-seller by Bernard-Henri Levy and Jarhead (Scribner, 2003) by Anthony Swofford, an ex-marine who fought in the first Gulf War and later attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Today, our war literature is no less vivid and troubling-even if it is less grand in theme and less demure in detail.

Lost in America by Colby Buzzell