Brian Turner is a poet/writer & ex US Army veteran who served for seven years with stations in both Bosnia-Herzegovnia & Iraq. This excellent book extends many ruminations & accounts during, after & prior to his deployment, defined by Turner’s starkly descriptive & stylized writing characteristic. His style is blunt & terse but also verbose, ornate & often abstruse & cryptic with many peregrine qualities. It’s evocative & can be considerably ambiguous, sometimes to extremes, I would not even be uncomfortable with christening it avant-garde on occasion, whereas at others it’s profoundly direct with a literary brutality. Some of the passages are very abstract & have a dream-like/oneiric angle. The book can easily be read for these qualities alone, irrespective of any absence of interest in modern war & conflict. but should a desire for knowledge in the inner-realities of recent conflicts be present, Turner’s accounts contain reams of salient information from his very direct experience of military conduct in Iraq & the muted phenomenon of post conflict home-coming/reintegration into the civilian sphere & demilitarization. Continue reading My Life as a Foreign Country – Brian Turner – Autobiography/Memoir →

City Of Lies is the fantastic debut by British-Iranian journalist Ramita Navai. An exceptionally engrossing book that I scoffed back in a few days due to the massively captivating content and excellently evocative writing ornamentation/style of the author. The enigma that is contemporary Iran (Tehran specifically in this case) has been a focal fascination for me for some time as one of the most intriguing, ornate, tragic, exotic, and contradictory nations/cultures on earth, where essentially a draconian theocracy adnates with the madness of modernity amongst the vestiges of an early empire commingled with trace relics of a mysticism/religion (Zoroastrianism). Continue reading City Of Lies: Love, Sex, Death & The Search For Truth In Tehran – Ramita Navai – Non Fiction →