Marine war veteran and National Book Award finalist ELLIOT ACKERMAN presents his new memoir PLACES AND NAMES, an astonishing reckoning with the nature of combat and the human cost of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.

Marine war veteran and National Book Award finalist ELLIOT ACKERMAN presents his new memoir PLACES AND NAMES, at the American Writers Museum.

At once an intensely personal book about the terrible lure of combat and a brilliant meditation on the larger meaning of the past two decades of strife for America, the region and the world, PLACES AND NAMES bids fair to take its place among our greatest books about modern war.

By moving back and forth between his recent experiences on the ground as a journalist in Syria and its environs and his deeper past in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, Ackerman creates a work of astonishing atmospheric pressurization. He shares extraordinarily vivid and powerful stories of his own experiences in battle, culminating in the events of the Second Battle of Fallujah, the most intense urban combat for the Marines since Hue in Vietnam, where Ackerman's actions leading a rifle platoon saw him awarded the Silver Star. He weaves these stories into the latticework of a masterful larger reckoning, with contemporary geopolitics through his vantage as a journalist in Istanbul and with the human extremes of both bravery and horror.

ELLIOT ACKERMAN is the author of the novels 'Waiting for Eden,' 'Green on Blue,' and 'Dark at the Crossing,' which was a finalist for the National Book Award. His writings have appeared in Esquire, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Magazine, among other publications, and his stories have been included in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Travel Writing. He is both a former White House Fellow and Marine, and served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. He divides his time between New York City and Washington, D.C.