MacArthur Genius and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Finkel writes extensively on the devastating effects of war on the human psyche. In his bestselling books, as well as in years of observant and clear-eyed reporting, Finkel explores what we ask of the men and women we send to war—and how we fail them when they come home.

During the troop surge of 2007, Finkel spent several months as an embedded reporter with the 2-16 Rangers, an army battalion tasked with securing a particularly dangerous area of Baghdad. In his award-winning 2009 book The Good Soldiers and his subsequent followups, 2013’s Thank You for Your Service and 2024’s An American Dreamer, Finkel recounts the Rangers’ grueling 15-month tour in Iraq, as well as their return to the United States—a transition fraught with nearly as much stress, trauma, and heartbreak as their time in Baghdad.

As tensely readable as Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down but with the elegiac tone of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, The Good Soldiers was praised by The New York Times as “a ferociously reported, darkly humorous and spellbinding book.”

“I’m urging everyone I know to give Thank You For Your Service just a few pages, a few minutes out of their busy lives. The families honored in this urgent, important book will take it from there.”

—Katherine Boo, National Book Award–winning author of Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Finkel’s second book, Thank You for Your Service, follows the Rangers he wrote about in The Good Soldiers into their post-deployment lives. This “incredibly moving sequel” (Publishers Weekly) is another feat of embedded journalism that delves, with Finkel’s characteristically stark and evocative prose, into the experiences of soldiers returning from war—only to find that the war has followed them home. The book was adapted into 2017 feature-length film by DreamWorks and Universal Pictures. Thank You for Your Service was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award and was named a best book of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and numerous other outlets. Like The Good Soldiers before it, Thank You For Your Service has been popular common read selections around the country.

“The stories of the soldiers and their families portrayed in Thank You for Your Service possess a visceral and deeply affecting power… that will haunt readers long after they have finished this book.”

—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

In his latest book, An American Dreamer: Life in a Divided Country, Finkel follows Brent Cummings, one of the unforgettable figures of the previous books, coping with the feeling that the country he loves is fracturing before his eyes. As The New York Times observed, “Finkel has made art out of a defining moment in history. You will be able to take this book down from the shelf years from now, and say: This is what happened. This is what it felt like.”

An internationally recognized journalist, Finkel won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for reporting on US efforts to establish democracy in Yemen. In 2012, he was honored with a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant. As a reporter and enterprise editor for The Washington Post, Finkel has reported from Africa, Asia, Central America, Europe, and across the United States, and has covered wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Finkel speaks on the role of journalism in wartime and the effects of military service on individuals and communities. He has addressed policymakers, veterans, and students at venues across the country, including Duke University, Penn State, West Point, The Clinton Presidential Center and Park, and annual conferences of the National Council on Family Relations and the National Association for Rural Mental Health.