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Fri, 07/18/2008

Evan Wright, author of Generation Kill - our blogger for the week of 7/21:

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Evan Wright is our guest blogger during the week of July 21st. If you have any questions for him, add a comment to any of his posts. Here is some brief information about Generation Kill:

They were called a generation without heroes.
Then they were called upon to be heroes.

Within hours of 9/11, America’s war on terrorism fell to those like the twenty-three Marines of the First Recon Battalion, the first generation dispatched into open-ended combat since Vietnam. They were a new pop-culture breed of American warrior unrecognizable to their forebears—soldiers raised on hip hop, video games and The Real World. Cocky, brave, headstrong, wary and mostly unprepared for the physical, emotional and moral horrors ahead, the “First Suicide Battalion” would spearhead the blitzkrieg on Iraq, and fight against the hardest resistance Saddam had to offer.

Now a major HBO event, Generation Kill is the national bestselling book based on the National Magazine Award-winning story in Rolling Stone. It is the funny, frightening, and profane firsthand account of these remarkable men, of the personal toll of victory, and of the randomness, brutality and camaraderie of a new American War.

About Evan Wright

Evan Wright is the author of Generation Kill, now the basis of the HBO miniseries for which he served as co-writer.

Wright earned his degree in medieval and Renaissance studies from Vassar College, an education he soon put work at Hustler magazine, where he served as "Entertainment Editor." In the late 1990's he began writing feature articles for Rolling Stone.

At Rolling Stone Wright focused on youth subcultures, from radical environmentalists to skinheads to sorority girls. His work is characterized by immersion in his subjects' worlds, detailed reporting and dark humor.

After 9/ll he pitched his editor on the idea that since the US military was "basically another youth subculture," he ought to be writing about it. He has covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

He is the recipient of two National Magazine Awards, one for reporting on the war in Iraq in Rolling Stone and the other for a profile published in Vanity Fair.

Generation Kill received numerous awards, including the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the Los Angeles Times book award, a PEN USA literary prize and the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation's award for "Best History of the Marine Corps."

He is currently at work on two books for Putnam:

Hella Nation, a collection of essays and reporting to be published in the Spring of 2009

The Seed, a reported memoir of brainwashing to be published in the Summer of 2010.