Review by Booklist Review
Pulitzer Prize--winner Caputo has written sensitively nuanced portrayals of war, trauma, memory, and guilt for decades. His short fiction offers an ideal vehicle for exploring Caputo's primary strength, his mapping of the complex yet reptilian brain of the human male. In the title story, an epic in miniature, a war veteran and former medic returns to Vietnam to locate the remains of a fellow soldier. In "A Near-Death Experience," an aging wildlife photographer becomes smitten with a young, raven-haired researcher while on assignment in Africa, leading him to make questionable choices. In another adventurous yarn, Captain Kirby must navigate an old ship through a treacherous Caribbean storm while a new crewmate tells a tale about a valuable Mayan jade statue. A retired couple takes an excursion to Vietnam, where the husband faces demons and long-buried remorse for an atrocity he committed decades earlier. A former foreign service officer takes a mystical side trip to a jungle temple, where things feel eerily surreal. Each story features Caputo's Hemingwayesque prose as he combines history and imagination in a mosaic of haunted consciousness. Caputo brilliantly examines the lingering moral and psychological costs of conflict, in which memory functions as both wound and tether. A searing yet deeply compassionate story collection that explores the fragile borders between survival, guilt, and redemption.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Caputo, a Pulitzer Prize--winning journalist and author of the classic Vietnam War memoir A Rumor of War, offers a resonant story collection in which characters seek connection and atonement under extreme circumstances. The cinematic title entry concerns a Vietnam veteran who returns to Hanoi decades later to search for two injured black ops soldiers his troop was forced to abandon. Hoping to find closure for himself and a sister of one of the soldiers, he instead uncovers unsavory details about their mission. "A Near-Death Experience," set during a Kenyan safari, features a middle-aged wildlife photographer whose increasingly dangerous attempts to impress an attractive younger graduate student nearly cost him his life. Caputo riffs on Raiders of the Lost Ark with "The Deliverer," a morality tale about phony archaeologist Covington, "one of those dudes who loots tombs and ruins," and his shifty associate Jed Tyner, who worms his way onto a Bermuda-bound boat captained by a scrupulous Navy veteran on the eve of a hurricane. With "The Traveler," Caputo paints a mesmerizing portrait of an aging American couple's ill-fated voyage up the Mekong River. Throughout, he capably infuses the stories' lushly drawn locations with themes of loss, desire, and death. The author's fans will be thrilled to find that his powers remain undiminished. (Jan.)
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