Matches2005

"Soldiers in the Gaza Strip always keep a bullet for themselves in case of capture. This reality lurks behind the swagger and bravado of young men armed to the teeth with guns and fear. Matches propels the reader into the life and mind of one such man, a young American member of the Israel Defense Forces. Patrolling the streets of the West Bank in the dead of night, playing a high-stakes off-duty game of Risk with his fellow soldiers, making illicit love to the wife of his best friend, Nathan Falk lives each moment with an increasing awareness of the arbitrary boundary between life and death. His story, told with the fierce intensity and poetic intimacy of a memoir, is an indelible portrait of the damage war does to the soul of a man."--BOOK JACKET.