Books

Day six: War by Sebastian Junger

My favorite war book of all time. 

I’ve never been in a war or anywhere near one, so take it with a grain of salt. But you can’t talk about this book without praising its realism. At the very least, any civilian should be able to recognize a believably complicated picture of humanity’s relationship with war. 

Yeah, war’s bad and miserable of course. But for the young men standing behind the weapons and hoping the enemy bullets miss them, it’s also peerlessly exciting. 

The book is full of great characters, memorable scenes, captivating detail, excellent writing, and a surprising amount of comic relief. Fans of Sebastian Junger will recognize his familiar role of narrator/character taken to its pinnacle. 

There’s also a pair of great documentaries to go with it. 

If you only ever read one book about war, read this one. 

5/5 no notes

Day seven: Freedom by Sebastian Junger

Not his strongest work, but not bad. 

Explicitly, it’s a story of a weird, long hike he took with some friends interspersed with characteristically well researched and written information about, well… freedom. 

It was most enjoyable for me as the implicit story of his midlife crisis. He was clearly in a weird place emotionally. I suspect he was processing some actual PTSD from the War days and also probably feeling a bit uncomfortable about having achieved such success on such a sensitive topic. You get the feeling he was trying to recreate the feeling of being part of a small, fiercely cohesive, tightly aligned group as a form of therapy. Or at least as a hit of his preferred drug. 

It’s a relatively weak point in his bibliography and I suggest Tribe instead as a direct comparable. And don’t go digging deep into the minor titles at all until you’ve read the Perfect Storm and War. 

Three stars by Sebastian Junger standards.

had similar feelings about this book 

i expect it would hit different if you were in a similar place as him, which is probably why he wrote it in the first place

Yeah, for sure. But even for that cohort, I’d probably steer them to The Road, or one of the Shackleton books, or even Anabasis before Freedom