Description
Book SynopsisFollowing the success of Jarhead, Anthony Swofford assumed he had exorcised his military demons -- but as every veteran knows, that isn''t exactly how it works. In these searing, courageous pages, Swofford struggles to make sense of what his military service meant, and to decide -- after nearly ending it -- what his life can and should become.
Consumed by drugs, booze, fast cars and the wrong women, Swofford almost lost everything and everyone that mattered to him. Embarking on a series of RV trips with his dying father, a Vietnam vet, in an attempt to heal their difficult relationship, and meeting a like-minded woman (who will become his wife) in a chance encounter, Swofford begins to grapple with his volatile past and forge a path toward redemption.
HOTELS, HOSPITALS, AND JAILS is a must-read memoir that raises essential questions about masculinity, about fathers and sons, and about love.
Trade ReviewAnthony Swofford has given us a complex, unflinching, loving, and sometimes harrowing memoir. Candid as a locomotive, written with fury and grace, this book has a dangerous, achingly desperate personality of its own. I was shaken and moved. - Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried
Swofford has done an amazing job showing how war plays out in peoples' lives for years after they come home. I read this book with the eagerness one usually reserves for fiction. It is a tremendous look into one man's attempt to replace war with life. - Sebastian Junger, author of War
Following Swofford's struggle to come to terms with a difficult father and his experience of war- and the two are intertwined - we soon realise that this writer is making easier our struggles against leading a parent's life instead of our own. He blazes a trail for all of us with honesty and skill, gem after gem. Swofford is quite simply the master of the metaphor. The chapter describing his visit to Bethesda Naval Hospital will break your heart and it should. - Karl Marlantes, author of Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War and What it is Like To Go To War
By turns profane and lyrical, swaggering and ruminative, Jarhead is not only the most powerful memoir to emerge thus far from the last gulf war, but also a searing contribution to the literature of combat. - New York Times
A brutally honest memoir...gut-wrenching frontline reportage. - Entertainment Weekly, on Jarhead
