Black Hearts: One Platoon’s Descent Into Madness in Iraq’s Triangle of Death by Jim Frederick

This novelesque work of nonfiction (Broadway Books, 2011) is the book Capote night well have written had he been embedded with a platoon of US troops guarding a highway in the desert south of Baghdad in the early days of the occupation. At the center of the book is a war crime more horrendous than what happened in Capote’s Holcombe but, like Truman, Frederick eschews the question who done it for the much harder to resolve what makes people capable of such things? He deftly chronicles how daily suicide missions shatter psyches and how being ordered to clear IEDs by way of walking on top of them quickly erodes a soldier’s sense of purpose. Jim Frederick takes no liberties whatsoever by putting “descent into madness” in his subtitle. This is not for the faint of heart, but a sobering look at how otherwise good kids lose their souls at the edge of empire. —Ryan Krull