Peter van Agtmael’s Absurd, Grotesque Chronicle of the Fallout from the Iraq War

Wrestling with this question is part of the pleasure, and the challenge, of “Sorry for the War” (whose title, van Agtmael said, is meant both as a sincere apology and a bitterly ironic expression of helplessness). If you had to beam a single artifact back in time to warn Americans in, say, 2002 how surreal and grotesque the world they were about to create would be, you might do well to show them this book. By leaping from country to country, year to year, character to character, it deëmphasizes the circumscribing politics and forces us to notice all the little ways in which the war twists and perverts whatever it touches, over there as well as over here.