Redeployment (Klay) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
In Redeployment, Phil Klay, a former Marine who served in Iraq show[s] us the myriad human manifestations that result from the collision of young, heavily armed Americans with a fractured and deeply foreign country that very few of them even remotely understand. Klay succeeds brilliantly, capturing on an intimate scale the ways in which the war in Iraq evoked a unique array of emotion, predicament and heartbreak. In Klay’s hands, Iraq comes across not merely as a theater of war but as a laboratory for the human condition in extremis. “Redeployment” is hilarious, biting, whipsawing and sad. It’s the best thing written so far on what the war did to people’s souls.
Dexter Filkins - New York Times Book Review


(Starred review.) This debut collection of a dozen stories resonates with themes of battle and images of residual battlefield pain and psychological trauma.... It’s clear that Klay, himself a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps who served in Iraq, has parlayed his insider’s knowledge of soldier-bonding and emotional scarring into a collection that proves a powerful statement on the nature of war, violence, and the nuances of human nature.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) The Iraq War and its aftermath is the subject of this powerful and unflinching compendium, which explores the true cost of serving in combat on the human body and, more important, the human psyche.... Harrowing at times and blackly comic at others, the author's first collection could become for the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts what Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried is for the Vietnam War. —Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA
Library Journal


(Starred review.) A sharp set of stories, the author's debut, about U.S. soldiers in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and their aftermaths, with violence and gallows humor dealt out in equal measure. [T]he 12 stories reveal a deep understanding of the tedium, chaos and bloodshed of war, as well as the emotional disorientation that comes with returning home from it.... Klay's grasp of bureaucracy and bitter irony here rivals Joseph Heller and George Orwell.... A no-nonsense and informed reckoning with combat.
Kirkus Reviews