NY Times Book Review Praises David Zimmerman's Novel, The Sandbox

Reviews continue to come in for David Zimmerman's Iraq war novel, The Sandbox, published by Soho Press in 2010.  Hailed as  a "strong debut," the novel recently received a positive review in the New York Times Sunday Book Review: 

"On the opening page of “The Sandbox,” David Zimmerman’s gripping first novel about the Iraq war, Pvt. Toby Durrant’s convoy comes across a dead girl in the road, her body “a small white mound, like a fallen bird.” Toby’s response is to “put this child in the small cigar box I keep hidden in the back of my head, close its cardboard lid and snap a couple of rubber bands around it to keep it tightly shut. Just like I’ve done with the rest.” ... For a character like this, in a war as full of indiscretion, deception and savage violence as Iraq’s, there can really be only one destiny: the wrong end of a bad deal. But Zimmerman has more in mind than merely getting a hard-luck soldier into trouble. “The Sandbox” is loaded with an M.R.E. caseful of plot elements, all pulled from Iraq war headlines — lost billions in cash, prisoner interrogations, soldier indiscretions, failed counterinsurgency plans — and all play their part in bringing Toby’s story to its terrible conclusion."   

                                                           --NY Times Book Review, April 16, 2010