[A] praiseworthy example of how the empathetic imagination can function beautifully in nonfiction writing.... Turner has a talent for amalgamating disparate experiences, especially between civilian and soldier, but also between history and the present.... History can only be served by this kind of attention. Man must look at what he has done. And Turner looks, brilliantly. -- Jen Percy - The New York Times Book Review
Turner is...a poet, and he cannot help but see the world, even the world of combat, in terms of beauty, fragility and heartbreaking splendor.... [His] eloquent rendering illuminates both the shared space and the painful divide between poet and soldier, mission and memory, war and peace. -- Roxana Robinson - Washington Post
Turner is the rare soldier-writer who takes a deep interest in Iraqis-their language and literature, their past, their daily doings, their inner lives. -- George Packer - The New Yorker
My Life as a Foreign Country is brilliant and beautiful. It surely ranks with the best war memoirs I've ever encountered-a humane, heartbreaking, and expertly crafted work of literature. -- Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried
In Brian Turner's extraordinarily capable hands, language is war's undoing, in the sense that his words won't allow absurdity and terror to be anything less than real. My Life as a Foreign Country is lyrical and restless, both ironic and profoundly empathetic. -- Mark Doty, author of Fire to Fire, winner of the National Book Award
Turner's voice is prophetic, an eerie calm in the midst of calamity...Achingly, disturbingly, shockingly beautiful. -- Nick Flynn, author of The Reenactments and The Ticking Is the Bomb
A brilliant fever dream of war's surreality, its lastingness, its place in families and in the fate of nations. Each sentence has been carefully measured, weighed with loss and vitality, the hard-earned language of a survivor who has seen the world destroyed and written it back to life. This is a profound and beautiful work of art. -- Benjamin Busch, author of Dust to Dust
A book...about the haunted past and a haunted man... A story of working through trauma, but above all it's a book about a man, a country, even a species beleaguered by a terrible attachment to war. -- Tomas Hachard - NPR
The psychological consequences of war are movingly portrayed... [a] standout. -- Publishers Weekly
