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Nonfiction The Syrian humanitarian catastrophe HARA HOTEL A Tale of Syrian Refugees in Greece By Teresa Thornhill 354 pp. Verso Reviewed by Tom Glenn Teresa Thornhill, a middle-aged Briton, worked with Syrian refugees at the Hara Hotel in Greece in 2016 for two weeks. Several months later, she went to Austria to meet with one young Syrian Kurd she had helped and to record the story of his clandestine walk through the mountains of Macedonia and his journey on foot through Serbia and Hungary. At the beginning of 2017, she returned briefly to Greece to learn what had happened to the Syrians she had tried to help. These three trips make up the three parts of Hara Hotel , a book that details the misery of the hapless Syrian refugees. Woven through the story is the history of the rebellion against the bloodthirsty regime of Hafez al-Assad and his son, Bashar al-Assad; the rise of Daesh (acronym for the Arabic phrase al-Dawla al-Islamiya al-Iraq al-Sham , that is, the Islamic State of Iraq an...

Nonfiction Punishment is to go on living THE ODYSSEY OF ECHO COMPANY: The 1968 Tet Offensive and the Epic Battle to Survive the Vietnam War By Doug Stanton 313 pp. Scribner Reviewed by Tom Glenn Doug Stanton knows combat. His bio makes no reference to military service, but he brings alive on the page the grisliness of the battlefield so graphically that he must have experienced it. And Stanton writes better than any other author on Vietnam that I have read. He uses the techniques of fiction to tell of the carnage, but the events he catalogues really happened. His prose is clipped, precise, and pointed; his paragraphs lean and sharp; his vocabulary incisive. Nor does he shy away from describing the unspeakable—the wounds and deaths of soldiers on both sides of the conflict, the dragging of bodies away from the battlefield, the scattered body parts. His naked realism combined with his flair for words makes for riveting reading. The prose of Odyssey locked me in from the first page with ...