The latest book by Peter Mansoor, Gen. Raymond E. Mason Chair in Military History, has been named runner-up for best biography/autobiography by the Southern California Book Festival.  

Surge: My Journey with General David Petraeus and the Remaking of the Iraq War (Yale University Press, 2013) is an insider's view of the most decisive phase of the Iraq War.  Before coming to The Ohio State University, Mansoor was executive officer to Gen. Petraeus during the time the surge strategy was developed and implemented.

Using newly declassified documents, unpublished manuscripts, interviews, author notes, and published sources, Surge explains how President George W. Bush, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Ambassador Crocker, Gen. Petraeus, and other U.S. and Iraqi political and military leaders shaped the surge from the center of the maelstrom in Baghdad and Washington. 

Winners of the Southern California Book Festival were honored at an awards ceremony on October 18 at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood.

Topping the biography category as well as the entire competition was Kindred Beings: What Seventy-Three Chimpanzees Taught me About Life, Love, and Connection, by Sheri Speede, which tells the story of the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center, a forested home for orphans of the bush meat trade and mistreated chimps in Cameroon.