Just finished Sebastian Junger’s War, an excellent first-person account of being embedded with soldiers in Afghanistan. It wasn’t what I expected–but if a book doesn’t defy expectations, it might not be an interesting book. “Journalistic convention holds that you can’t write objectively about people you’re close to, but you can’t write objectively about people who are shooting at you either. Pure objectivity–difficult enough while covering a city council meeting–isn’t remotely possible in a war….Objectivity and honest are not the same thing, though, and it is entirely possible to write with honesty about the very personal and distorting experiences of war.”