The 10 Best Books of 2009

(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-12-10 10:47
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THE GOOD SOLDIERSThe 10 Best Books of 2009

By David Finkel

Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus &Giroux, $26.

Finkel, a Pulitzer Prize--winning writer and editor at The Washington Post, gives full voice to his subjects, infantry soldiers from Fort Riley, Kan. (average age 19), posted in the lethal reaches of Baghdad at the height of the “surge.” Finkel’s own perspective emerges through spare descriptions — of a roadside bombing or the tortured memories of a single soldier — that capture the harrowing realities of war.