American War
by Omar El Akkad
The second American Civil War. Told by a Southern refugee.
For you if
you're old enough to understand what it means that America exports its wars and never lives inside them
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El Akkad is an Egyptian-Canadian journalist who covered Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, the Kandahar massacre, and the Ferguson unrest before writing American War — a second American Civil War set in the 2070s in which the post-9/11 American foreign policy playbook (surveillance, detention, suicide bombers, proxy conflicts, civilian casualties rationalized as acceptable losses) is applied to American soil. The protagonist is a Southern refugee. El Akkad's reporting career becomes the novel's argument: the things America does abroad are not abstract. This is what they look like from inside. Read it and ask what we've been manufacturing.
Where This Book Lives
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