Lecture Topics
A selection of the author's speeches:
- Reporting on War
- Tales from the Front Lines
Other Areas of Expertise
- Arts and Culture
- Communications/Media
- Global Issues
- Military
Endorsements
Riveting is the word that best describes the Dexter Filkins lecture and accompanying slide presentation. Our Florida International University journalism students were transfixed by his visuals of soldiers in battle and his stories about the choices a war correspondent has to makeā"to get the job done and to stay alive while doing so. It was an experience they will never forget.
- Kate MacMillin
- Instructor and Chair of the Hearst Lecture Committee
- School of Journalism and Mass Communication
- Florida International University
More Information
Dexter Filkins
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Foreign Correspondent
Base: Cambridge, MA
- Photo: James Hill
Dexter Filkins, a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, has covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001. Before that, he worked for the Los Angeles Times, where he was chief of the paper's New Delhi bureau, and for The Miami Herald. David Halberstam hailed Filkins's work, calling it ''reporting of the highest quality imaginable.'' Filkins has twice been a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, and has won a George Polk Award and two Overseas Press Club awards. Most recently, he was a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University.
Filkins's debut work of nonfiction, The Forever War, shows us the remarkable chain of events that began with the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s, continued with the attacks of 9/11, and moved on to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Filkins's narrative moves across a vast and various landscape of amazing characters and astonishing scenes: deserts, mountains, and streets of carnage; a public amputation performed by Taliban; children frolicking in minefields; skies streaked white by the contrails of B-52s; a night's sleep in the rubble of Ground Zero. Like no other book, The Forever War allows us a visceral understanding of today's battlefields and of the experiences of the people on the ground, warriors and innocents alike. It is a brilliant, fearless work, not just about America's wars after 9/11, but ultimately about the nature of war itself.
Works by this Speaker
The Forever War
From the front lines of the battle against Islamic fundamentalism, a searing, unforgettable book that captures the human essence of the greatest conflict of our time.
Through the eyes of Dexter Filkins, the prizewinning New York Times correspondent whose work was hailed by David Halberstam as “reporting of the highest quality imaginable,” we witness the remarkable chain of events that began with the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s, continued with the attacks of 9/11, and moved on to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Filkins’s narrative moves across a vast and various landscape of amazing characters and astonishing scenes: deserts, mountains, and streets of carnage; a public amputation performed by Taliban; children frolicking in minefields; skies streaked white by the contrails of B-52s; a night’s sleep in the rubble of Ground Zero.
We embark on a foot patrol through the shadowy streets of Ramadi, venture into a torture chamber run by Saddam Hussein. We go into the homes of suicide bombers and into street-to-street fighting with a battalion of marines. We meet Iraqi insurgents, an American captain who loses a quarter of his men in eight days, and a young soldier from Georgia on a rooftop at midnight reminiscing about his girlfriend back home. A car bomb explodes, bullets fly, and a mother cradles her blinded son.
Like no other book, The Forever War allows us a visceral understanding of today’s battlefields and of the experiences of the people on the ground, warriors and innocents alike. It is a brilliant, fearless work, not just about America’s wars after 9/11, but ultimately about the nature of war itself.
