Welcome to the Suck: Narrating the American Soldier's Experience in Iraq
"Remarkable literature and film are beginning to emerge from both the Persian Gulf War and the Iraq War. Peebles explores the new landscape of such works . . . . Along the way, the author demarcates the new digital battlefield—blogs and Skype—that should reduce alienation but paradoxically call it into heightened relief. Part of the context of these works is the cynicism of the soldiers whose first political memory is, as Peebles puts it, an image of Monica Lewinsky, but who are still idealistic as they enter the war. This classic disjuncture empowers these works and transforms the destruction, waste, stupidity, and disillusionment that are part of all wars into powerful, moving art. Summing Up: Highly recommended for all readers."—Choice(January 2012)"Welcome to the Suckprovides a timely and essential revision of our understanding of contemporary war writing, surveying the ways in which recent books and films represent war and how this marks a change in our understanding of the subject. I am terrifically impressed with Peebles's notion that the media is a central concern of Gulf War and Iraq War narratives, which not only show their soldier characters modeling their own experiences on earlier war narratives but also incorporate/address new forms of media, such as blogs."—Andrew Hoberek, University of Missouri-Columbia"Stacey Peebles's thoughtful book gives us a chance to see how the depictions of the war in Iraq are differentiated from those of the Vietnam War and how those differences are shaped by changes in media, understandings of trauma, constructions of gender, and how the war is perceived at home. If you're interested in how representations of war have changed in recent decades, this book should be on your shelf."—Susan Jeffords, Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, University of Washington Bothell"Welcome to the Suckis original and timely; it deserves a  broad audience among scholars in American literature, American studies, and  American history."—John Carlos Rowe, USC Associates Chair in Humanities and  Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity, University of  Southern California