Long ride back: A novel - Hardcover

Jacob, John

3.17

6 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0938410466 ISBN 13: 9780938410461

Publisher: Distributed by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, 1988

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Travis Jones, a Vietnam veteran who participated in top-secret, dangerous missions during the war, has trouble adjusting to civilian life

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From Publishers Weekly:

In a powerful fiction debut, poet Jacobs (winner of the 1980 Carl Sandburg Award) has written one of the most complete and credible evocations of the Vietnam War era. The hero, Travis Jones, spends the first half of the 1960s as a soldier in the jungles. After his discharge, he joins the campus protesters of the late '60s and early '70s. The novel's setting reaches into the era of Reaganite reactionism, and the administration's shabby treatment of Vietnam veterans despite rhetorical flag-waving. Until now, most interesting writing about the U.S. and Vietnam has been done by news reporters and ex-servicemen stationed there in the 1960s. The focus has been on combat, setting aside the fact that some of the generation that fought in the war also fought against it at home. Jacob brings both aspects of the war into clear relief. His combat scenes have a visceral impact, and his description of the atmosphere in the antiwar movement will resonate with authenticity for anyone who remembers it with a reasonable amount of objectivity. The simplicity and authority of Jacob's prose add a significant dimension to a memorable novel.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

As a member of a special intelligence unit in Vietnam, Travis Jones was a cool, efficient killer. Now a lawyer in Chicago, he is obsessed by memories of combat. Cutting rapidly from past to present, the narrative is as fragmented as the life of the narrator. Travis may be resilient, but his story includes other veterans whose psychic wounds will never heal: one is in jail, another hooked on drugs, and a third confined to a psychiatric ward. Jacob's accounts of battle are stark and moving, and the book builds to an ominous climaxthe sealed orders that will eventually produce Travis's most haunting nightmare. Albert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., Cookeville
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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