James Verini is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and National Geographic. He has also written for The New Yorker, the Atavist, and other publications, and has won a National Magazine Award and a George Polk Award.
"Most war reporters pay short visits to the front lines, grabbing
images and stories that shock us and, at their best, sketch a few
details of the larger story. Great ones, like Verini, immerse you
in the danger and horror and thrill and black comedy of these
places with novelistic detail."
*Mark Bowden - Airmail*
"(Verini) has written not only a deeply human account of the
conflict but also a fascinating historical investigation of Mosul
itself."
*Elliott Ackerman - New York Times*
"(A) deeply reported, beautifully written first-person
account."
*Anne Barnard - Foreign Affairs*
"A painful, moving, and necessary read… Verini is almost recklessly
brave. He embedded himself, whenever he could, with virtually every
kind of allied unit fighting ISIS, and he found himself in the
middle of the action, constantly. He was present when the snipers
opened up, when the car bombs came, and when the mortars fell.
(And) because he was so brave — because he spent days, weeks, and
months with the men who fought — he was able to capture the truth
of war in Iraq (and of Iraq itself) in a way that precious few
writers have. In fact, he helped me to make more sense, over a
decade later, of my own deployment."
*David French - National Review*
"A vivid and bare-knuckles account of the fight against ISIS."
*Tom Bowman - NPR*
"(An) eloquent, awesome account."
*Robert Fisk - The Independent*
"A poignant and detailed profile, beautifully written, of people in
war… They Will Have to Die Now is an exceptional study both of
modern war and of the most significant battle in the war against
Islamic State. I read each page with relish and gratitude."
*Anthony Lloyd - The Times*
"A necessary book… Verini’s front-line reporting is
exhilarating."
*Telegraph*
"Verini’s account is startlingly candid and informed. A deeply
thoughtful boots-on-the-ground work about a topic that many of us
have stopped thinking about."
*Kirkus Reviews*
"Verini offers up a searing account of the battle against the
Islamic State in Mosul in 2016 and 2017, focusing not just on the
clashes with the jihadi fighters but also on the plight of the
people caught in the middle of the battling forces ... Verini
presents with sensitivity the bloody and complicated history of the
area, the fraught feelings Iraqis have towards America and its
involvement in their country, and the way conflict with the Islamic
State has ripped families apart. A must-read for anyone who wants
to understand this ongoing and tragic conflict."
*Booklist*
"A deadly accurate, richly illuminating, profoundly saddening
work."
*Gen. Merrill McPeak, US Air Force Chief of Staff, Ret.*
"They Will Have to Die Now is the story of what happened after most
Americans stopped paying attention to Iraq. It’s a small miracle
that a writer as good as James Verini witnessed the battle of
Mosul. His book is erudite, humane, bleakly funny, and unbearably
sad. It will take its place among the very best war writing of the
past two decades."
*George Packer, author of Our Man and The Assassins’ Gate*
"An urgent, scalding, hallucinatory work of war reportage, in the
tradition of Michael Herr and Philip Gourevitch. His
account…captures the horror, the nobility, and the sheer grinding
absurdity of twenty-first-century warfare…A significant
achievement."
*Patrick Radden Keefe, New York Times best-selling author of Say
Nothing*
"They Will Have to Die Now is a vivid, captivating, compelling, and
graphic account of the major battle against the Islamic State in
Iraq, the Battle for Mosul…James Verini conveys brilliantly the
often tragic ancient and modern history of Iraq, and he captures
superbly the brutal reality of one of the most intense urban
battles since WWII. In so doing, he describes the terrible
hardships experienced by the Moslawis and both the worst and the
best of mankind in war."
*Gen. David Petraeus (US Army, Ret.) former commander of the Surge
in Iraq, US Central Command, and Coalition Forces in Afghanistan,
and former director of the CIA*
"Verini’s firsthand account of the Battle of Mosul is a thing of
terrible beauty."
*Jonathan Franzen*
"James Verini’s book stands comparison with the pathbreaking works
of modern war journalism that meld into great literature. One has
to go back to the Vietnam War and Michel Herr’s Dispatches to find
such a vivid, poignant, and historically grounded narrative of an
appalling war; a war caused no little by the misdeeds, missteps,
and malevolence of the myriad powers and forces that have tried to
dominate the Middle East."
*Ali Allawi, former minister of finance, defense, and trade of
Iraq*
"With the eye of a novelist and a historian’s sweep, James Verini
tells a moving, gripping, complexly layered story of Mosul, from
the private calamities of its present to the buried dynasties of
its past."
*Larissa MacFarquhar, author of Strangers Drowning*
"This is a stunning book, brave in its reporting and beautiful in
its writing. It is funny and sad and seared into me, and I can’t
recommend it highly enough, not just to people interested in the
truth of a war but to anyone in search of the truth of
humanity."
*David Finkel, Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter at the Washington
Post and author of The Good Soldiers*
"This is such an important and deeply nuanced book. Verini paints
absolutely convincing portraits of the Iraqi soldiers trying to
take their broken country back, and in humanizing them, he joins
the ranks of Liebling and Pyle and Gellhorn—American journalists
able to embed so selflessly with soldiers, to listen first and
theorize rarely, to tell a story as it happened. He does us and the
Iraqis trying to rebuild, after decades of catastrophic war, a
service."
*Dave Eggers, best-selling author of Zeitoun, A Hologram for the
King, and The Circle*
"The definitive account of one of the most pivotal and bitter
military campaigns of the modern era…This isn’t typical military
history, though, but an eyewitness account of what happens to
ordinary people who find themselves living on the battlefield, the
compromises they must make to stay alive…This is war reporting at
its very best."
*Scott Anderson, author of Lawrence in Arabia*
"James Verini plunges you into the heart of the climactic battle of
the Iraq War and won’t let you leave. He seems to be everywhere,
gets to know everyone, vividly chronicles everything he sees and
hears—and never once calls attention to himself. The weapons may be
new—drones and iPads and executions on YouTube—but the blood and
confusion and betrayal are as old as war itself. They Will Have To
Die Now is an astonishment."
*Geoffrey C. Ward, coauthor of Ken Burns’s The Civil War, The War,
and The Vietnam War*
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