Minimal Damage
Stories Of Veterans
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- 16,99 €
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- 16,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
The Salt Lake City Tribune has called Lee Barnes “one of the finest writers of short stories in the contemporary West.” Minimal Damage contains seven stories and a novella that depict veterans of several wars in search of dignity and purpose in a civilian life that has no need for men who were soldiers. With emotion, humor, and clarity, Barnes creates characters who show us what it is to live with the trauma of having experienced combat. The fractured souls and twisted lives of these men remind us that war’s ultimate damage extends far beyond the battlefield.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
War shows its human face in former Green Beret Barnes's mostly successful collection about veterans of Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Mogadishu and Iraq trying to get on with their civilian lives after experiencing the horrors of battle. In "Punishment," a former army medic, counting down his last hours on death row (he killed a policeman), relives the time he saved the life of an enemy soldier during the Panama invasion. In the title story, a black Desert Storm veteran finds his ordinary existence turned upside down when the victims of a serial killer are found buried around his house. And in the novella, "Snake Boy," a heroin-addicted, homeless Vietnam vet is kidnapped by a snake-handling evangelist who cures the vet of his addiction and forces him to join his traveling show. In several of the stories, the veteran angle seems peripheral, but the strongest pieces exemplify the words of one character who tells his daughter that "all we can do is invent myths to smooth the harshness." The lives on display here do just that in stories told with understated compassion and unexpected flashes of humor.
