Four Shields of Power

A stereoscopic study of battlefield carnage and suburban aspirations - of the chaos of roadside explosions abroad and the masquerade of normality at home - Eve Ottenberg Stone's stingingly detailed, stately paced Dead in Iraq is an elegy suffused with a sense of loss and fortified with a quiet fury over lives destroyed, dreams dashed, bonds severed. It's a novel about what happens under the noise of headline news, and how the lives of the survivors are lived after those headlines fade - the silent, invisible true casualty toll of war. James Wolcott, Vanity Fair columnist and author of the novel The Catsitters Eve Ottenberg not only knows how to tell a story, but brings you so far inside that it'll stay with you. Nat Hentoff, Village Voice columnist