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Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier's Story of a Forgotten War Kindle Edition

by Matti Friedman (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 694 ratings
Editors' pick Best Biographies & Memoirs
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“A book about young men transformed by war, written by a veteran whose dazzling literary gifts gripped my attention from the first page to the last.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Friedman’s sober and striking new memoir . . . [is] on a par with Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried -- its Israeli analog.” —The New York Times Book Review

It was just one small hilltop in a small, unnamed war in the late 1990s, but it would send out ripples that are still felt worldwide today. The hill, in Lebanon, was called the Pumpkin; flowers was the military code word for “casualties.” Award-winning writer Matti Friedman re-creates the harrowing experience of a band of young Israeli soldiers charged with holding this remote outpost, a task that would change them forever, wound the country in ways large and small, and foreshadow the unwinnable conflicts the United States would soon confront in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.


Pumpkinflowers is a reckoning by one of those young soldiers now grown into a remarkable writer. Part memoir, part reportage, part history, Friedman’s powerful narrative captures the birth of today’s chaotic Middle East and the rise of a twenty-first-century type of war in which there is never a clear victor and media images can be as important as the battle itself.

Raw and beautifully rendered, Pumpkinflowers will take its place among classic war narratives by George Orwell, Philip Caputo, and Tim O’Brien. It is an unflinching look at the way we conduct war today.
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  1. Print length
    274 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    Algonquin Books
  5. Publication date
    May 3, 2016
  6. File size
    2361 KB
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From the Publisher

1 2 3
Spies of No Country The Aleppo Codex Pumpkinflowers
Customer Reviews
4.4 out of 5 stars
879
4.4 out of 5 stars
677
4.3 out of 5 stars
694
Price $18.49 $11.99 $11.69
Also by Matti Friedman “Spies of No Country is thrilling, moving, and, like everything that Matti Friedman writes, deeply humane.” —Nicole Krauss, author of Forest Dark “A superb work of investigative journalism that reads like a detective thriller.”—The Wall Street Journal “On a par with Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried—its Israeli analog.” —The New York Times Book Review

Editorial Reviews

Review

“In Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story Mr. Friedman has written a top-notch account of this under-analyzed war, persuasively arguing that it heralded a new style of combat in the Middle East, though no one knew it at the time.” —Jennifer Senior, The New York Times

“This superb book is partly a history of the war, partly a personal memoir, and partly a work of political analysis. But mainly it is an effort to tell the story of the young men who fought to defend something “the size of a basketball court”—not all of whom survived. Pumpkinflowers is rich enough to allow different readers to draw their own political conclusions, if they choose to draw them at all. Above all, it is a book about young men transformed by war, written by a veteran whose dazzling literary gifts gripped my attention from the first page to the last.” —Bret Stephens, The Wall Street Journal

“Sober and striking…on par with Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” – its Israeli analog.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
“…phenomenal…extremely moving…” —Bari Weiss, The Wall Street Journal
 
“Matti Friedman’s powerful memoir of his IDF service in Lebanon in the late-’90s foreshadows the complexities of 21st-century warfare.” —The New York Jewish Week

“Friedman, a journalist and author of “The Aleppo Codex,” writes with great feeling and insight…. The author’s account of military life transcends the particulars of this tale.” —Christian Science Monitor

“Powerful account of youthful Israelis maturing, fighting, and dying at a forgotten Lebanon outpost. In this limber, deceptively sparse take on the Middle East's tightening spiral of violence, Friedman combines military history and personal experience on and off the line in deft, observant prose. The narrative is reminiscent of novels by Denis Johnson and Robert Stone, linking combat's violent absurdity to the traumatized perspectives of individual participants. A haunting yet wry tale of young people at war, cursed by political forces beyond their control, that can stand alongside the best narrative nonfiction coming out of Afghanistan and Iraq.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Remarkably educational and heartfelt: Friedman’s experiences provide a critical historical perspective on the changing climate of war in the Middle East, shifting from short official conflicts into longer unwinnable wars full of guerilla tactics and the deliberate creation of media narratives and images. His lyrical writing, attention to detail, and personal honesty draw the reader into empathy along with understanding. Friedman’s memoir deserves wide readership." —Publishers Weekly, starred review
 
“fast and engaging… A compelling war memoir containing elements of terror, observation, boredom, and grim (at times absurd) humor. This is an excellent read…” —Library Journal, starred review

“A compelling narrative, freighted with explosive geopolitical implications.” —Booklist, starred review
 

From the Back Cover

“A compelling narrative, freighted with explosive geopolitical implications.” —Booklist, starred review

When I went back to the Pumpkin in the fall of 2002 I thought it was a conclusion--an end to that war, and to the disquiet it left me and the others it touched. But I know now that I was wrong. It wasn’t a conclusion. On the hill in 1995 we had been at the start of something: of a new era in which conflict surges, shifts, or fades but doesn’t end, in which the most you can hope for is not peace, or the arrival of a better age, but only to remain safe as long as possible. None of us could have foreseen how the region would be seized by its own violence--the way Syria, a short drive from the outpost, would be devoured, and Iraq, and Libya, and Yemen, and much of the Islamic world around us. The outpost was the beginning. The present day might still be the beginning. The Pumpkin is gone, but nothing is over. —from Pumpkinflowers

“Poignant and fascinating. Matti Friedman tells a war story with a journalist’s rigor and eye for detail, and a poet’s touch. He manages to be lyrical, graceful, and deeply evocative even when tackling the harshest subjects imaginable.” —Lucette Lagnado, author of The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit

“Evocative, emotionally wrenching, and yet clear-eyed and dispassionate, Matti Friedman’s haunting war memoir reminds one of Michael Herr’s unforgettable Vietnam memoir, Dispatches.”—Kai Bird, author of The Good Spy

“A historical jigsaw puzzle and an examination of Israel’s fraught national identity. Friedman illuminates the confusion at the heart of the conflict and chillingly echoes America’s own slide into prolonged wars in the Middle East.” —Siobhan Fallon, author of You Know When the Men Are Gone

“Inspiring, heartbreaking, illuminating. Matti Friedman’s brilliant account of a forgotten war seen through the lens of a simple soldier is at once a coming-of-age story and an essential chronicle about how the twenty-first century was born.”—Yossi Klein Halevi, author of Like Dreamers

 

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B013JBH89M
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Algonquin Books; Reprint edition (May 3, 2016)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 3, 2016
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 2361 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 274 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 694 ratings

About the author

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Matti Friedman

Matti Friedman

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Matti Friedman’s work as a reporter has taken him from Lebanon to Morocco, Cairo, Moscow and Washington, D.C., and to conflicts in Israel and the Caucasus. He has been a correspondent for the Associated Press, and his writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Tablet Magazine, and elsewhere. He grew up in Toronto and lives in Jerusalem.

"The Aleppo Codex," his first book (Algonquin, 2012) won the 2014 Sami Rohr Prize and the ALA's Sophie Brody Medal, among other honors. His second book, "Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier's Story" (Algonquin, May 2016) won starred reviews in Kirkus, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal, and was compared by the New York Times to Tim O'Brien's masterpiece "The Things They Carried."

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
694 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Lane I.
5.0 out of 5 stars Contemplating life in a meaningless war
Reviewed in the United States on June 27, 2023
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Matti Friedman’s Pumpkinflowers unfolds in the mid-1990s on a hilltop in southern Lebanon in the last years of the Lebanon war. Arriving there, young, inexperienced recruits like Matti are met with a constant threat from the missiles, mines, and snipers, the danger growing more pointless as the pullout is imminent. There is no combat-style battle, instead, Matti’s buddies are steadily wounded or killed in brutal and bizarre circumstances. What can one learn from such a harrowing experience?
“Perception of the thinness of line between here and gone,” Friedman writes, “is the debt I owe that place, and the reason I am grateful for my time there."
There are many similarly deep observations on life from someone who was facing death on a daily basis. While Friedman's political commentary on the events he had experienced feel somewhat dated today, his deeply personal account of engagement in a war that lost its meaning is profoundly moving.
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Annie
4.0 out of 5 stars A Touching Tribute.
Reviewed in the United States on July 8, 2017
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A well written account of a forgotten war where young Israelis were wounded and died protecting the North of Israel in the buffer Zone between Lebanon and Israel in the nineties.
At an out post called the Pumpkin Friedman describes the events over these years in simple but powerful language.
Battling Hezbollah militants in a time when the 'suicide bomber' was yet to make a mark, the boys on the Pumpkin obeyed orders and wished for the normal life of a teenager.
This story is a tribute to those boys, some of whom never returned to their families and a look at the political climate of Israel and the Middle East at the time.
Israel is a country forever struggling to maintain their sovereign right to the land surrounded by hostile countries who would like to annihilate them.
I can't imagine how it would be to live with the constant threat of rockets being fired over the border into the country and almost daily attacks on the population by suicide bombers and the like.
I'm sure everyone would like to see peace in the area but that seems like a pipe dream with the ever growing threats and hostilities.
9 people found this helpful
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Jill
5.0 out of 5 stars One of the most thought-provoking reads of 2016
Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2016
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This is one of the best books produced in 2016. Matti Friedman writes about Israel, the Middle East, and the political and personal implications of war from a unique perspective. Born in Canada and an immigrant to Israel as a teenager, Friedman shares his skepticism towards Israel's military involvement in Lebanon. As a former combat soldier in the Israel/Lebanon conflict that occurred in the 90s and current reservist, Friedman honestly and poignantly paints a picture of a country whose attitude towards war and the military spans from the anti-war mothers of the kibbutzim, to the apolitical teenage soldiers who are performing their compulsory duties as members of a diverse set of troops, to right-wingers who justify war with keeping the country safe from terrorists. It is indeed a complicated country - and while all characters, including the author, share different views of militarism and war, all agree on one common goal: the survival of the world's only Jewish state.

As Western consumers of news (whom Friedman is clearly addressing as his audience in this book), we are constantly inundated with images of the Middle East and Israel. Generally, progressive news outlets tend to view Israel's military operations unfavorably - that is, Israel's military tactics are generally criticized, and consumers of the news are not really getting the full picture of the Middle East in general, or Israel's relationship to it. Friedman also has a journalistic background and has covered Israel while working for the Associated Press. These experiences, while not mentioned explicitly in the book, I believe served as motivating factors for the subject matter of this text.

The most powerful portion of this text (to me) was the last, when Friedman recounts a visit he took to Lebanon, where he was stationed whilst a soldier in the IDF. As an Israeli/Canadian dual citizen, he could only enter into Lebanon as a Canadian, and had to hide throughout his visit 1) his Jewish identity; 2) his Israeli citizenship; and 3) his service to the IDF. The most powerful part is when he was on his way to the Pumpkin (the outpost where he was stationed in the 90s) in southern Lebanon, and remarks that he "had traveled 12,000 miles (from Toronto) to arrive 20 miles from" where his family's home was located in northern Israel. This gives you a real sense of how serious (and sad) the divide of a border can truly be, especially in a place as volatile as the Middle East.
22 people found this helpful
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Dr. Robert S. Frey
5.0 out of 5 stars Human Reflections Through the Lens of a Young Infantryman
Reviewed in the United States on September 2, 2016
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Every word is carefully measured. Every short story that comprises this nonfiction work is thoughtful and considered. And several are as gripping as a jagged lightning bolt that splits the pitch-dark night sky. Authored by an Israeli-Canadian former combat infantryman and journalist, "Pumpkinflowers" provides seasoned reflections, layered with multiple meaning—about growing up, human friendships, serving in a remote military outpost, and witnessing powerful changes unfold in Israel and Lebanon in the 1990s and in this century, from both sides of an arbitrary security line. Most powerful of all are the “word-pictures” and “word-symbols” that Mr. Friedman paints and sculpts of the incredibly thin, almost imperceptible, divide between being alive and being dead, and friend and enemy—at both the individual and national levels. And you smell the dusty roads of northern Israel, and you see the gradual unfolding of a new Dawn of Readiness in the skies above the concrete and sandbags of the desolate “Pumpkin” outpost. This is not a work of weighty military strategies and sweeping geopolitical forces. Instead, what is most evident are the mundane moments, the shared sentiments, the fear, and the regular thoughts and feelings of young soldiers—those who lived, and those who did not. There are a number of times that the author includes verses penned by some of the famous poets of the First World War. "Pumpkinflowers," with its conservation of words, and the depth of impact and insight it conveys, is actually much closer to poetry than it is to prose. And all the better because of it.
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Top reviews from other countries

Joseph Myren
5.0 out of 5 stars AWESOME
Reviewed in Canada on December 15, 2023
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AWESOME
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Caio P.
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book!
Reviewed in Brazil on March 4, 2019
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Very good book that shows the perspective of an Israeli soldier in an outpost in Southern Lebanon. The book is very well written and easy to read, I couldn't stop reading it at some points! It also has some interesting discussions about what is new Middle East and what it means to people from Western countries.
This is one of the best books I read recently!
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Dror
5.0 out of 5 stars Touching, amazing and important
Reviewed in Germany on June 11, 2017
Verified Purchase
This is an Important piece dealing with an important period in Israel's history and it is doing with loads of understanding of humans and soldiers.
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emed0s
5.0 out of 5 stars exotic ... sad ... well researched ... funny ... it has it all
Reviewed in Spain on December 9, 2016
Verified Purchase
This one is a nice, really nice, welcome change of pace from all the Iraq and Afghanistan books that have come out in the last 10/15 years in regards to ... well, to pretty much everything. It is also very different from the big picture stuff that studies the 6 days and Yom Kippur wars.

So what is that you can find in this book and not in the aforementioned ones. Well, for starters this is a book narrating events from the 90s, and the author excels at giving plenty of pop culture references to that decade, be ready to revisit, or discover, some Backstreet Boys and The Cranberries songs.

The book also explores and reflects on the dynamics of a conscripted army, which to boot has a really young officer corps. So there's plenty of what are the motivations of a conscript, a conscript of a "besieged" country, a conscript that may have been born in Israel or far away, a conscript that may or may not be a Jew.

Also this is not memoir, it would be more apt to describe this book as "the tale of a COP" or stretching it as "the tale of the last days of the security zone" (that being the security zone inside Lebanon that the Israeli armed forces used to police). And to tell that tale the author includes his own experiences in the zone as a chapter, but also he has interviewed plenty of other veterans and civilians involved in the story which made up the other chapters.

The book scores extra points for being written in a way in which each death comes as, not a surprise but, a shock. There's plenty of war books out there that when recounting the events make pretty clear what is coming and who is going to die, not this one, in this one even when you know that someone is going to die the final moment comes a shock.

If you were born in the late 70s or early 80s the constant reflections of the author about how much time has passed since the events narrated will probably resonate with you.

Finally, my only complaint is with the English used by the writer as it shows that he is more used to express himself in Hebrew ... but it more than makes up for it with his sense of humor ...

"After rotating out of the line and boarding a civilian bus home a girl soldier would sometimes slip in next to me—a clerk or instructor coming from one of the safe bases inside Israel where such olive-drab unicorns roamed free,..."
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Yogesh kumar
5.0 out of 5 stars Superb...
Reviewed in India on July 24, 2016
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Superb narrative by soldier....reader will find himself or herself on the front besides soldier while reading the book...writer kept story interesting throughout the book...
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