IT may be a universal truth that war is hell, but in "One Soldier's War," Arkady Babchenko's jagged memoir of serving in the Russian army during the Chechen wars, nobody gets away unscathed, least of all the reader.

Babchenko's book was excerpted in the February issue of Harper's in a very sharp piece called The things they ate.

'One Soldier's War,' a memoir by Arkady Babchenko