August 22, 2011
A Homeless Man’s Burden (Lost Creek Books, 306 pp., $15.95, paper) is a conservative Christian mystery novel by Wesley Murphey, a Navy submarine veteran who served from 1975-79. A homeless man dies under an Oregon…
July 29, 2011
I started reading Robert McGowan ‘s collection of short stories, Nam: Things That Weren’t True and Other Stories, Some Funny, Some Sad (Meridian Star Press, 217 pp., $15.95, paper), in the Seattle VA Hospital…
July 29, 2011
In When Soldiers Cried: A True Story About Vietnam (Brandylane, 192 pp., $23.95), David Shea recreates his own Vietnam War story by writing it in the shape of a novel centering on a character named…
July 18, 2011
The Ensign Locker by John Zerr, (iUniverse, 436 pp., $33.95, hardcover; $23.95, paper) is a first novel about a junior ensign, Jon Zachery, on board the destroyer USS Manfred in 1966 off the coast of…
July 18, 2011
In Quiet As They Come (Ig Publishing, 200 pp., $15.95, paper), Angie Chau makes her Vietnamese characters come alive in all eleven brilliant stories. I shed tears for the pain in each story, especially…
July 18, 2011
Alivia Tagliaferri's Beyond the Wall : The Journey Home ( Ironcutter Media, 314 pp., $18.95, paper) is a novel about the Vietnam War, and also a novel about survivor guilt and PTSD. The main character,…
July 7, 2011
Robert Olen Butler (below ), best known for A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain , his 1993 Pulitzer-Prize winning collection of short stories, has been turning out first-rate fiction for three decades. Butler served…
June 25, 2011
Darrell S. Mudd's Cold War Burning (PublishAmerica, 462 pp., $29.99) is billed as fiction but contains a lot of photos, which makes it look more like a memoir. It includes a photo of the 16th…
June 25, 2011
It’s hard to tell if How Can You Mend This Purple Heart by T. L. Gould (CreateSpace, 216 pp., $11.99, paper) is fiction or memoir as it is driven by a lot of invented dialogue…
June 25, 2011
Carl Hitchens tells his readers in Sitting With Warrior (iUniverse, 180 pp., $13.95, paper) that this book is a “work of personal memoir, myth and spirituality, ” so I can’t tell you when and where…