1968 - Softcover

Haldeman, Joe

4.02

318 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0380708035 ISBN 13: 9780380708031

Publisher: Avon, 1997

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In 1968, a nation fought two wars: one abroad...and one with itself. On one front, Spider walked point and tried to survive an insanity he neither accepted nor understood. On another, his "girl," Beverly, drifted into a strange counterculture that offered her dangerous freedoms at the price of her innocence. In 1968, a great black leader was murdered on a balcony in Memphis...a political convention in Chicago was stained with young blood...and Spider and Beverly searched for their separate peace in two worlds on fire. It was the year that changed us all. In 1968, everything went crazy.

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About the Author:

Joe Haldeman first won the Hugo Award for his novel The Forever War. His work includes the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel The Hemingway Hoax and the acclaimed Worlds Trilogy. He has won a total of three Nebula Awards and four Hugo Awards. A Vietnam veteran who was wounded, Joe Hadleman teaches writing at M.I.T. and lives part-time in Florida with his wife, Gay.

From Publishers Weekly:

Evoking painful nostalgia, Haldeman's (The Forever Wars) tragic and depressing novel chronicles a year in the life of Darcy "Spider" Speidel, a combatant in and victim of Vietnam. A teenage college dropout, Spider is drafted and sent to Nam as a combat engineer. Spider is just a scared, uncertain kid reluctantly playing the game of war for keeps; after he's wounded during the onset of the Tet offensive, he's evacuated back to the States, where his real war begins. His onetime sweetheart, embroiled in the hippy counterculture, has taken up with a new, draft-deferred boyfriend. Confused and helpless, the traumatized Spider lacks the support of even his doctors and his family. Haldeman uses bold language, powerful images and a graphic style to tell his emotional tale, in which concentrated, diary-like entries intensify the drama and despair. He also takes every opportunity to engage in social criticism, ranging from the conduct of the war to draft inequities, from the sexual revolution to the failings of military medical care. He even tries unconvincingly to resurrect the conspiracy theories surrounding the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. Affecting and compelling on several levels, Spider's story may nevertheless strike readers as a Forrest Gump without any hope or inspiration.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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