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The Things They Carried
One of the first questions people ask about The Things They Carried is this: Is it a novel, or a collection of short stories? The title page refers to the book simply as "a work of fiction," defying the conscientious reader's need to categorize this masterpiece It is both: a collection of interrelated short pieces which ultimately reads with the dramatic force and tension of a novel. Yet each one of the twenty-two short pieces is written with such care, emotional content, and prosaic precision that it could stand on its own. The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and of course, the character Tim O'Brien who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. They battle the enemy (or maybe more the idea of the enemy), and occasionally each other. In their relationships we see their isolation and loneliness, their rage and fear. They miss their families, their girlfriends and buddies; they miss the lives they left back home. Yet they find sympathy and kindness for strangers (the old man who leads them unscathed through the mine field, the girl who grieves while she dances), and love for each other, because in Vietnam they are the only family they have. We hear the voices of the men and build images upon their dialogue. The way they tell stories about others, we hear them telling stories about themselves. With the creative verve of the greatest fiction and the intimacy of a searing autobiography, The Things They Carried is a testament to the men who risked their lives in America's most controversial war. It is also a mirror held up to the frailty of humanity. Ultimately The Things They Carried and its myriad protagonists call to order the courage, determination, and luck we all need to survive..
Price: $7.49
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If Not Now, When?: Duty and Sacrifice in America's Time of Need
A Medal of Honor recipient looks back at his own service—and ahead to America’s future.Jack Jacobs was acting as an advisor to the South Vietnamese when he and his men came under devastating attack. Severely wounded, 1st Lt. Jacobs took command and withdrew the unit, returning again and again to the site of the attack to rescue more men, saving the lives of a U.S. advisor and thirteen Allied soldiers. Col. Jacobs received the nation’s highest military award, the Medal of Honor. Here, with candor, humor, and quiet modesty, Col. Jack Jacobs tells his stirring story of heroism, honor, and the personal code by which he has lived his life, and expounds with blunt honesty and insight his views on our contemporary world, and the nature and necessity of sacrifice. If Not Now, When? is a compelling account of a unique life at both war and peace, and the all-too-often unexamined role of the citizenry in the service and defense of the Republic..
Price: $14.68
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Heat Lightning (Virgil Flowers)
Fresh from his “spectacular” (Cleveland Plain Dealer) debut in Dark of the Moon, investigator Virgil Flowers takes on a puzzling—and most alarming—case, in the new book from the #1 bestselling author. John Sandford’s introduction of Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigator Virgil Flowers was an immediate critical and popular success: “laser-sharp characters and a plot that’s fast and surprising” (Cleveland Plain Dealer); “an idiosyncratic, thoroughly ingratiating hero” ( Booklist). Flowers is only in his late thirties, but he’s been around the block a few times, and he doesn’t think much can surprise him anymore. He’s wrong. It’s a hot, humid summer night in Minnesota, and Flowers is in bed with one of his ex-wives (the second one, if you’re keeping count), when the phone rings. It’s Lucas Davenport. There’s a body in Stillwater—two shots to the head, found near a veteran’s memorial. And the victim has a lemon in his mouth. Exactly like the body they found last week. The more Flowers works the murders, the more convinced he is that someone’s keeping a list, and that the list could have a lot more names on it. If he could only find out what connects them all . . . and then he does, and he’s almost sorry he did. Because if it’s true, then this whole thing leads down a lot more trails than he thought—and every one of them is booby-trapped. Filled with the audacious plotting, rich characters, and brilliant suspense that have always made his books “compulsively readable” ( Los Angeles Times), this is vintage Sandford..
Price: $5.99
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Night of Thunder: A Bob Lee Swagger Novel
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR STEPHEN HUNTER RETURNS WITH HIS MOST RIVETING BOB LEE SWAGGER VOLUME TO DATE.Talk about a ride! Woe unto he who crosses Bob Lee Swagger, especially when his daughter's life is at stake. Forced off the road and into a crash that leaves her in a coma, clinging to life, reporter Nikki Swagger had begun to peel back the onion of a Southernfried conspiracy bubbling with all the angst, resentment, and dysfunction that Dixie gangsters can muster. An ancient, violent crime clan, a possibly corrupt law enforcement structure, gunmen of all stripes and shapes, and deranged evangelicals rear their ugly heads and will live to rue the day they targeted the wrong man's daughter. It's what you call your big-time bad career move. All of it is set against the backdrop of excitement and insanity that only a weeklong NASCAR event can bring to the backwoods of a town as seemingly sleepy as Bristol, Tennessee. A master at the top of his game, Hunter provides a host of thrilling new reasons to read as fast as we can. When Swagger picks up peeling where his daughter left off, and his swift sword of justice is let loose, we find a true American hero in his most stunning action to date. And -- in the form of Brother Richard, a self-decreed "Sinnerman" out of the old fire-and-brimstone tradition -- Hunter offers up his most diabolical, engaging villain yet. A triumph of story, character, and style, Night of Thunder is Stephen Hunter at his very best..
Price: $14.40
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The Best and the Brightest
"A rich, entertaining, and profound reading experience " -- The New York Times "[The] most comprehensive saga of how America became involved in Vietnam It is also the Iliad of the American empire and the Odyssey of this nation's search for its idealistic soul. THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST is almost like watching an Alfred Hitchcock thriller." -- The Boston Globe "Deeply moving . . . We cannot help but feel the compelling power of this narrative . . . . Dramatic and tragic, a chain of events overwhelming in their force, a distant war embodying illusions and myths, terror and violence, confusions and courage, blindness, pride, and arrogance." -- Los Angeles Times "Most impressive, superb -- perceptive, literary, multidimensional." -- The New York Times Book Review "A story which every American should read." -- St. Louis Post-Dispatch .
Price: $10.33
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Surviving Hell: A POW's Journey
Thorsness joined the U.S. Air Force in 1951 at age 18 and became a jet pilot during the Vietnam War. During an 1967 mission he was shot down over North Vietnam Injured and captured, he spent six years in the Hanoi Hilton. When the war ended in 1973, Thorsness was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Surviving Hell is a harrowing story of captivity, as told by the man who lived it..
Price: $18.18
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Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam
A revelatory look at the decisions that led to the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, drawing on the insights and reassessments of one of the war’s architects I had a part in a great failure. I made mistakes of perception, recommendation and execution. If I have learned anything I should share it." These are not words that Americans ever expected to hear from McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. But in the last years of his life, Bundy—the only principal architect of Vietnam strategy to have maintained his public silence—decided to revisit the decisions that had led to war and to look anew at the role he played. He enlisted the collaboration of the political scientist Gordon M. Goldstein, and together they explored what happened and what might have been. With Bundy’s death in 1996, that manuscript could not be completed, but Goldstein has built on their collaboration in an original and provocative work of presidential history that distills the essential lessons of America’s involvement in Vietnam. Drawing on Goldstein’s prodigious research as well as the interviews and analysis he conducted with Bundy, Lessons in Disaster is a historical tour de force on the uses and misuses of American power. And in our own era, in the wake of presidential decisions that propelled the United States into another war under dubious pretexts, these lessons offer instructive guidance that we must heed if we are not to repeat the mistakes of the past. .
Price: $12.95
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Tree of Smoke: A Novel
Winner of the National Book Award
One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year
Named a Best Book of the Year by Time, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Amazon.com, Salon, Slate, The National Book Critics Circle, The Christian Science Monitor . . .
Tree of Smoke is the story of William "Skip" Sands, CIA--engaged in Pschological Operations against the Vietcong--and the disasters that befall him. It is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert and into a war where the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In the words of Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, Tree of Smoke is "bound to become one of the classic works of literature produced by that tragic and uncannily familiar war."
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Price: $8.89
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