Laurel Ridge staff and faculty are welcome to join us for the Do Empathy Book Series, a monthly book discussion that encourages us to see through others' eyes and grow in understanding of the human experience. Whether you read all the book, some of it, or none, you're welcome to join us!

November's book is Phil Klay's collection of short stories, Redeployment (288 p.). The 2014 National Book Award winner for Fiction, Phil Klay's first book chronicles the experiences of soldiers and veterans of the Iraq War. Join us as we consider:

• How active military service impacts individuals - and their families
• How society succeeds or fails to reintegrate returning veterans
• How our perceptions of war evolve over time

Register through this page for a calendar invitation, event reminders, and notifications of when the book is ready for check-out. Registrants will be notified when the library has copies available for loan, typically five weeks in prior to discussion!

Redeployment takes readers to the front lines of the war in Iraq, asking us to understand what happened there and what happened to the soldiers who returned. Interwoven with themes of brutality and faith, guilt and fear, helplessness and survival, the characters in these stories struggle to make meaning out of chaos.

In Redeployment, a soldier who has had to shoot dogs because they were eating human corpses must learn what it is like to return to domestic life in suburbia, surrounded by people “who have no idea where Fallujah is, where three members of your platoon died.” In “After Action Report,” a lance corporal seeks expiation for a killing he didn’t commit in order that his best friend be unburdened. A mortuary affairs marine tells about his experiences collecting remains—of U.S. and Iraqi soldiers both. A chaplain sees his understanding of Christianity, and his ability to provide solace through religion, tested by the actions of a ferocious colonel. And in the darkly comic “Money as a Weapons System,” a young Foreign Service officer is given the absurd task of helping Iraqis improve their lives by teaching them to play baseball. These stories reveal the intricate combination of monotony, bureaucracy, comradeship, and violence that make up a soldier’s daily life at war and the isolation, remorse, and sense of displacement that can accompany a soldier’s homecoming.