Booklists: suggested reading

 

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Veterans Booklist

 

 

Annotations are from Advance, the Ingram Book Magazine, unless noted.

Fiction

• The Deep Green Sea
  Author: Butler, Robert Olen
  Publisher: Holt List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0805031308 Date: 1998
  Booklist LJ
  A memorable and incandescent love story between a contemporary Vietnamese woman orphaned in 1975 and a Vietnam veteran who returns from America to a war-torn land, seeking closure and a measure of peace. The Deep Green Sea is infused equally with eroticism and with Butler's deep reverence for Vietnamese myth and history.
  
• Carry Me Home
  Author: Del Vecchio, John M.
  Publisher: Bantam $ 22.95 ISBN: 0553072242 Date: 1995
  Booklist
  The author of the landmark Viet Nam novel The 13th Valley now transports the soldiers of that distant war to their final battlefield--the home front. Carry Me Home is a novel about two decades in our collective lives and the cleansing of our spirit--an inspiring and unforgettable story about America itself.
  Updated 10.24.05
• The Clearing
  Author: Gatreaux, Tim
  Publisher: Knopf $ 23 ISBN: 0375414746 Date: 2003
  Booklist PW
  From "one of the best writers to have emerged in the 1990s" (Kirkus Reviews), comes The Clearing, a story of family, of what sustains people through loss, of establishing a community in the deepest wilderness and then defending it.
  Suggested Reading: Veterans
  Updated 5.29.03
• Closing Time
  Author: Heller, Joseph
  Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 24 ISBN: 0671746049 Date: 1994
  Booklist
  In a novel as darkly comic and audaciously ambitious as Catch-22, Joseph Heller has dared to write the sequel to his American classic. Using many of Catch-22's characters--now older if not wiser--Heller deftly satirizes the realities and myths of America in the half-century since World War II.
  Updated 10.24.05
• The Ha-Ha
  Author: King, Dave
  Publisher: Little Brown $ 23.95 ISBN: 0316156108 Date: 2005
  LJ
  The Ha-Ha marks the beginning of what is sure to be a stellar career for Pushcart Prize nominee Dave King--a debut novel of extraordinary emotional power. When a mute war veteran opens his home to a young boy, he gets a glimpse of life outside his shell--with all its exuberant joys and crushing sorrows.
  Suggested Reading: Debuts
  Updated 11.2.04
• The Names of the Dead
  Author: O'Nan, Stewart
  Publisher: Doubleday $ 23.95 ISBN: 0385481926 Date: 1996
  Booklist PW
  From the acclaimed author of Snow Angels comes an astonishing thriller of the heart about a family haunted by the aftereffects of war and terrorized by a man who cannot escape it. With the exquisite feelings and perfect pitch that made his first novel an unforgettable literary debut, The Names of the Dead delivers a memorable page-turner.
  Updated 10.24.05
• Ordinary Heroes
  Author: Turow, Scott
  Publisher: FSG $ 26 ISBN: 0374184216 Date: 2005
  Kirkus PW LJ
  In reconstructing the terrible events and agonizing choices his father faced on the battlefield during World War II, in the courtroom, and in love, Stewart Dubinsky gains a closer understanding of his past, of his father's character, and of the brutal nature of war itself.
  Suggested Reading: Legal Stars
  Updated 10.11.05

Nonfiction

• My Father's War: A Memoir
  Author: Collins, Julia
  Publisher: Four Walls $24.95 ISBN: 1568582242 Date: 2002
  LJ
  Julia Collins traces the effects of World War II on her emotionally scarred father. In spare and touching prose, Collins speaks to the experience of veterans everywhere who know the lingering devastation of war.
  Updated 10.24.05
• Marching Home: To War and Back With the Men of One American Town
  Author: Coyne, Kevin
  Publisher: Penguin $ 25.95 ISBN: 0670871508 Date: 2003
  Booklist LJ
  Offering a gripping look at life in wartime, Marching Home is a compelling story of World War II and what happened in its wake in one small New Jersey town.
  Updated 10.24.05
• Daddy, We Hardly Knew You
  Author: Greer, Germaine
  Publisher: Knopf $ 19.95 ISBN: 0394583132 Date: 1990
  Kirkus
  A moving, deeply personal account of Germaine Greer's impassioned search for the "secret" truths about her father and his World War II experience.
  Updated 10.25.05
• Home From the War: Learning From Vietman Veterans, with a new preface by the author on the war in Iraq
  Author: Lifton, Robert J.
  Publisher: Other $ 16.95 ISBN: 1590511689 Date: 2005
  LJ
  Noted psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton offers a powerful critique of American militarism during the Vietnam War. Recognized as the ultimate text for those working with Vietnam veterans, the book's insights have had enormous influence among psychologists and psychiatrists all over the world. Lifton's new preface connects the experience of Vietnam veterans with that of veterans of the war in Iraq. Both were brought into the "atrocity producing situations" that led to My Lai and Abu Ghraib. Lifton raises the possibility that Iraq veterans could experience the kind of healing transformation that many who fought in Vietnam were able to achieve. - Publisher Marekting.
  Updated 10.24.05
• Chickenhawk: Back in the World: Life After Vietnam
  Author: Mason, Robert
  Publisher: Viking $ 22.50 ISBN: 0670848352 Date: 1993
  Booklist PW
  The triumphant sequel to Robert Mason's bestselling account of his service as a chopper pilot in Vietnam--a no-holds-barred autobiography that reveals the war's shattering legacy in the heart of a returning vet.
  Updated 10.24.05
• The Great Boom
  Author: Sobel, Robert
  Publisher: St Martins $ 29.95 ISBN: 0312208901 Date: 2000
  Kirkus
  The Great Boom is a major book on how America's World War II veterans literally rebuilt and totally revitalized America as it exists today. Their individual stories are woven throughout this engrossing narrative.
  Updated 10.25.05
• The Circle of Hanh: A Memoir
  Author: Weigl, Bruce
  Publisher: Grove $ 24 ISBN: 0802116612 Date: 2005
  Booklist Kirkus
  With all the breathtaking imagery and lyric fury that characterizes his acclaimed poetry, Weigl explores the central experience of his life as a writer and a man--the Vietnam War, which tore his life apart and in return gave him his poetic voice.
  Updated 10.24.05