About the Book
"The product of high intelligence and passionate conviction, alternately mournful and gripping, and occasionally hilarious. It's also a ripping good story." --- Soho Weekly News
The author, a veteran war correspondent and former prize-winning reporter with The New York Times, has called his new novel "asymmetric journalism," a new and original genre that melds real-time reporting with literary fiction.
A bright and privileged young American, Micah Ford, is battered by the great tragedies of modern America. He loses his mother, a nurse, to AIDS. His father is killed on 9/11, and a grandfather dies in Katrina. A girlfriend is murdered in a hate-crime in the Deep South. Micah's biography overlaps his country's: They're both suffering from post-traumatic stress. Both are squarely "on the X."
Enlisting in the Army, he discovers a new clarity, nothing less than a new life, through the extreme violence he encounters during a secret mission against ISIS in Iraq. Torture, love, betrayal, a miracle or two, luck, American swagger, Islamist brutality, and a final compass-reading from valor --- it's all in here, in a book that one reviewer has found "alarming, poignant and nothing short of brilliant." Another critic called it "war porn, or war smut, something akin to pictures of flag-draped coffins returning home: colorful and descriptive, but also prurient."
About the Author: Mark McDonald is a veteran journalist, foreign correspondent and bureau chief. He has worked for Knight Ridder Newspapers, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Dallas Morning News and the Boston Globe. In addition to foreign postings in Paris, Moscow, Hanoi, Seoul and Hong Kong, he has reported from more than 100 countries plus a dozen combat theaters and disaster zones, including numerous deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. At the IHT and The New York Times he won several Publisher's Awards, Human Rights Press awards, and he shared the 2009 Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Journalism on Asia. While recovering from injuries sustained while embedded in Afghanistan, Mark served as the Howard R. Marsh Professor of Journalism at the University of Michigan, from 2005-2007. He previously held the Knight Fellowship in International Business as a Michigan Journalism Fellow. While at the Dallas Morning News he worked on a team that went on to win the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. He also won a Dallas Press Club Katie Award, APME and GLAAD awards, and the Charles Green Headliner Award as Sportswriter of the Year in Texas. Mark's sports journalism, foreign reporting and essays have appeared in a number of nonfiction books, including most recently Eddy van Wessel's prize-winning memoir on war photography, "The Edge of Civilization." Born in Washington, D.C., and a political science graduate of Kalamazoo College, Mark did post-bac work at Columbia University (history), New York University (fine arts) and the Monterey Language Institute (Vietnamese). He is a 2002 diplomate of Lomonosov Moscow State University in Russian language studies. He lives in New Mexico, Texas, Mexico and France.
