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Peace Meals

Candy-Wrapped Kalashnikovs and Other War Stories (INCLUDES WAITING FOR THE TALIBAN, PREVIOUSLY AVAILABLE ONLY AS AN EBOOK)

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About The Book

INCLUDES WAITING FOR THE TALIBAN, PREVIOUSLY AVAILABLE ONLY AS AN EBOOK

2011 JAMES BEARD FOUNDATION WRITING AND LITERATURE AWARD FINALIST

Travel books bring you places. War books bring you tragedy. In Peace Meals, war reporter Anna Badkhen brings us not only an unsparing and intimate history of some of the last decade’s most vicious conflicts but also the most human elements that transcend the dehumanizing realities of war: the people, the compassion they scraped from catastrophe, and the food they ate.
Making palpable the day-to-day life during conflicts and catastrophes, Badkhen describes not just the shocking violence but also the beauty of events that take place even during wartime: the spring flowers that bloom in the crater hollowed by an air-to-surface missile, the lapidary sanctuary of a twelfth-century palace besieged by a modern battle, or a meal a tight-knit family shares as a firefight rages outside. Throughout Badkhen’s stories, punctuated by recipes from the meals she shared with the people she encountered, emerges the most important lesson she has observed in conflict zones from Afghanistan to Chechnya: that war can kill our friends and decimate our towns, but it cannot destroy our inherent decency, generosity, and kindness—that which makes us human.

About The Author

Kael Alford

Anna Badkhen was born in the Soviet Union and moved to the United States in 2004. She began covering conflicts in 2001 and has written about people in extremis from four continents for Foreign Policy, The New Republic, The New York Times, and other publications. Her wartime reporting won the 2007 Joel R. Seldin Award for reporting on civilians in war zones from Psychologists for Social Responsibility. She lives in Philadelphia.

Product Details

  • Publisher: Free Press (October 25, 2011)
  • Length: 368 pages
  • ISBN13: 9781439166505

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