“[A] steady flow of Yossarian-flavored absurdity.”
— Publishers Weekly
“Compelling…Uses humor to illuminate the deadly absurdities of war…
a deft command of tone—from the slapstick to the tragic.”
— Kirkus Reviews
Jimmy Stephens makes the worst mistake of his career as a gossip columnist when he wrongly accuses a big star of cheating on his wife. Lawsuits are pending, and Jimmy’s imperious new editor blackmails him into taking the place of the paper’s only front-line war correspondent. Shipped off to the desert and embedded with a group of foul-mouthed but fraternal Marines, Jimmy provides a bewildered but unfiltered view of the invasion of Iraq that is alternately hair-raising, hilarious, and heartbreaking.
“As someone who donned a gasmask and tried but failed to embed with the U.S. Marines in Kuwait, I can say with gusto that Nicholas Kulish gets it exactly right: The high-testosterone, the needless WMD fears, the ineluctable forward drive of the whole ill-conceived operation. Kulish’s funny, engaging novel makes clear that the gargantuan mess we’ve made in Iraq all started with an impressionable and largely incompetent reporting corps who saw the invasion not as a tragic mistake but as a rollicking good adventure.”
— Hampton Sides, bestselling author of Blood and Thunder and Ghost Soldiers
“Last One In is a war story told with wit and sympathy. Sharply written and instantly engaging, it is a very funny book that is part of a distinctive literary tradition: the grunt’s comedy. Like Shakespeare’s Pistol or the Good Soldier Svejk, Last One In is embedded down with the grunts—the grunts of the media as well as the military—down where politics and ideology are less important than surviving.”
— Arthur Phillips, author of Prague and The Egyptologist
“Like Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato or David O. Russell’s film Three Kings, Nicholas Kulish’s witty, fast-paced and sympathetic novel set at the beginning of the war in Iraq brings home both the terror and the absurdity of combat in a way that nonfiction rarely can.”
— Adam Langer, author of Crossing California and The Washington Story
“Last One In hits on the kind of truth everyone should hear: The emotional truth. At times absurd, funny, and frightening, it is at all times unforgettable. The characters and descriptions are so vivid, I feel like I’ve spent time in a Humvee with four marines heading for Baghdad.”
— Paulina Porizkova, author of A Model Summer
