"Like many young men of his generation, Colby Buzzell was without a job, living at home with his parents. He spent his time hanging out at the skateboard park and drinking as much as humanly possible. Tired of the monotony and without any inspiring prospects, he decided, like his father before him, to join the Army. Within month he was in Iraq, hanging out of a Stryker vehicle, banging away with an M240 Bravo machine gun - and he found that he had something to say." "This is the startlingly honest story of a young man and war. Once he was deployed near Mosul with the 1st Battalion, 23rd Regiment, Buzzell toted heavy weaponry into "guerrilla warfare, urban style," and was struck by the absurd, often frightening world around him. He began writing a blog to make sense of his experience - and to make clear the ways in which it differed from what was being reported in the news and intelligence briefings from Washington, D.C." "The result is rich with unforgettable scenes: the raid on an Iraqi home during which a woman couldn't stop screaming; the fierce firelight where the resistance came for the first time from "men in black" - obviously Al Qaeda; the hesitation of a young soldier too scared to fight; and the time spent chain-smoking in the guard tower, counting tracer rounds being fired over the city. And as the popularity of Buzell's blog grew, it became clear that he had become the embedded reporter the Army couldn't control, despite its best, and often hilarious, efforts to do so."--BOOK JACKET.
The Bin Ladens rose from poverty to privilege; they loyally served the Saudi royal family for generations--and then one of their number changed history on September 11, 2001. Journalist Steve Coll tells the story of the rise of the Bin Laden family and of the wildly diverse lifestyles of the generation to which Osama bin Laden belongs, and against whom he rebelled. Starting with the family's escape from famine at the beginning of the twentieth century, through its jet-set era in America after the 1970s oil boom, and finally to the family's attempts to recover from September 11, this book unearths extensive new material about the family and its relationship with the United States, and provides a richly revealing and emblematic narrative of our globally interconnected times.--From publisher description.
