The Porchlight Business Book Awards longlist is here!

Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War

Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War

By Phil Klay

From the author of Redeployment and Missionaries , an astonishing fever graph of the effects of twenty years of war in a brutally divided America When Phil Klay left the Marines a decade ago, after serving as an officer in Iraq, he found himself part of the community of veterans who have no choice but to grapple with the meaning of their wartime experiences--for themselves and for the country.

READ FULL DESCRIPTION

Quantity Price Discount
List Price $29.00  
1 - 24 $24.65 15%
25 - 99 $20.30 30%
100 - 499 $18.85 35%
500 + $18.27 37%

Quick Quote

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit

Non-returnable discount pricing

$29.00


Book Information

Publisher: Random House Large Print Publishing
Publish Date: 05/17/2022
Pages: 384
ISBN-13: 9780593556412
ISBN-10: 0593556410
Language: English

What We're Saying

November 29, 2022

It seems like each and every category of our awards has elements of Current Events & Public Affairs percolating within them, but that doesn't negate the need for a dedicated category. These are the five best books in that space this year. READ FULL DESCRIPTION

November 17, 2022

“This terrific collection of books balances the innovative with the iterative, and champions doing the right things the right way to make our work and our future tangibly better, no matter the industry or the endeavor.” READ FULL DESCRIPTION

Full Description

From the author of Redeployment and Missionaries, an astonishing fever graph of the effects of twenty years of war in a brutally divided America
When Phil Klay left the Marines a decade ago, after serving as an officer in Iraq, he found himself part of the community of veterans who have no choice but to grapple with the meaning of their wartime experiences--for themselves and for the country. American identity has always been bound up in war--from the revolutionary war of our founding, to the civil war that ended slavery, to the two world wars that launched America as a superpower. What did the current wars say about who we are as a country, and how should we respond as citizens? Unlike previous eras of war, few other Americans have had to do any real grappling with the endless, invisible wars of the post-9/11 world at all; in fact, increasingly, few people are even aware they are still going on. It's as if there's a dark star with a strong gravitational force that draws a relatively small number of soldiers and their families into its orbit, while remaining inconspicuous to most other Americans. In the meantime, the consequences of American military action abroad may be out of sight and out of mind, but they are very real indeed. This chasm between military and civilian in American life, and the moral blind spot it has created, is one of the great themes of Uncertain Ground, Phil Klay's powerful series of reckonings in essay form over the past ten years with some of our country's thorniest concerns. In the name of what do we ask young Americans to kill, and to die? In the name of what does this country hang together? As we see at every turn in these pages, those two questions have a great deal to do with one another, and how we answer them will go a long way toward deciding where our troubled country goes from here.

About the Author

Phil Klay is a veteran of the US Marine Corps and the author of Redeployment , which won the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction, and Missionaries , which was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2020 by the Wall Street Journal.

Learn More

We have updated our privacy policy. Click here to read our full policy.