Thank You for Your Service (Finkel)

Book Reviews
This is a heartbreaking book powered by the candor with which these veterans and their families have told their stories, the intimate access they have given Mr. Finkel…into their daily lives, and their own eloquence in speaking about their experiences…The stories of the soldiers and their families portrayed in Thank You for Your Service possess a visceral and deeply affecting power…that will haunt readers long after they have finished this book
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times.


As he did in The Good Soldiers, Finkel absents himself from the narrative, immersing the reader in the quotidian life of soldiers and their families. Thank You for Your Service is elegantly reported, free of the entanglements of crusading self-aggrandizement on the one hand and, on the other, an overidentification with its subjects. Finkel refuses to pathologize soldiers, even as he concentrates on the 20 to 30 percent who have been psychologically damaged to some degree by their service in Iraq or Afghanistan…This is not—nor should it be—an easy book. But it is an essential one. Finkel refuses to gild the misery and ugliness of the last decade and the unpoetic aftermath of war with the kind of sentimentality that has so often clouded our thinking, not only about our military commitments but also about the veterans they produce
Elizabeth D. Samet - New York Times Book Review


(Starred review.) These soldiers have names and daughters and bad habits and hopes, and though they have left the war in Iraq, the Iraq War has not left them. Now the battle consists of readjusting to civilian and family life, and bearing the often unbearable weight of their demons.... [T]heir stories give new meaning to the costs of service.
Publishers Weekly


Finkel did an extraordinary job of explaining the Iraq War in The Good Soldiers.... Now he brings the war home, following many of the same men as they try to figure out how to engage again with both family and society.
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Finkel delivers one of the most morally responsible works of journalism to emerge from the post-9/11 era.... [T]he breadth and depth of his portraits of the men and women scarred by the 21st century's conflicts are startling.... The truly astonishing aspect of Finkel's work is that he remains completely absent from his reportage; he is still embedded. A real war story with a jarring but critical message for the American people.
Kirkus Reviews