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

Aired on Tuesday, May 31st.
Aired on Tuesday, May 31st.

"[The] longest, meatiest and most probing essays and articles presented here share the lasting power of Klay's acclaimed fiction.... [When] read together, [these pieces] amount to an interwoven, evolving, and revealing examination of Klay's central topic: What it means for a country always at war, that so few of its people do the fighting." -- James Fallows, The New York Times Book Review

What happens to our soldiers -- and our society, our culture, and our psyche -- when we as Americans live in an age of never-ending warfare? Our guest is the noted writer and military veteran Phil Klay, who won the National Book Award for Fiction a few tears ago for "Redeployment," a powerful collection of linked short-stories. He now has a new book out, which he tells us about; that book is "Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War." It's a gathering of essays, written over the span of a decade, that mainly looks at the chasm between the military and the civilian in American life -- and the omnipresent moral blind spot that this chasm has created. As noted by Tom Rick, writing for Washington Monthly: "Klay diligently examines American society in the two decades since 9/11, an event he calls 'a somber ghost hanging over our national discourse.' I think he succeeds admirably."

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