MWSA Book Review

The Blog of War

Authors: Matthew Currier Burden

Publisher:  Simon & Schuster

Reviewer: Bill McDonald – President of the MWSA

A Timely and Insightful Look at the War in Iraq and Afghanistan

In this new age of information reporting, blogging has become an important link for soldiers to communicate about their own “war on terrorism” in Iraq and Afghanistan. In his book “The Blog Of War – Frontline Dispatches from Military Bloggers in Iraq and Afghanistan” author and military veteran Matthew Currier Burden brings us the “news” from the frontlines as fresh and emotional as it gets. This is not “your father’s war book” for sure – this is a forerunner of things to come, where books are written on blogs as they happened in real time.

Burden does a great job of organizing the book and allowing us to feel and see different personalities and situations. There is even some prose mixed into the fold of this book and certainly lots of personal details about the life of our soldiers. This book is not some old censored news dispatch from the DOD but an insider view on what is really happening there NOW.

Exciting, entertaining (if that can be said about war and suffering) and insightful; this book breaks new ground and allows us to get a better understanding of what is happening and has happened in our current war. The reader can almost place themselves in the situations and the events – the editing format allows you to fully immerse into the experiences. The book does not feel like a blog but more like a series of online conversations that you are allowed to eavesdrop on.

The book is destined to set a trend for other blogger books as this one certainly leads the way with an excellent telling of our experiences in this current war. This will be a hard act to follow for the others! The Military Writer’s Society of America (MWSA) gives this book its highest rating of FIVE STARS.

Winner of the 2006 Gold Medal Award for Anthologies!