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[10], 240, [6] pages. Signed by the author on the fep. The dust jacket is price clipped and is in a plastic sleeve. Stephen Becker (1927 1999) was an American author, translator, and teacher whose published works include eleven novels and the English translations of many works, including Elie Wiesel s The Town Behind the Wall and The Forgotten and André Malraux s The Conquerors. After serving in World War II, he graduated from Harvard University and studied in Peking and Paris, where he was friends with the novelist Richard Wright and learned French in part by reading detective novels. The recipient of Paul Harris and Guggenheim Fellowships and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Becker taught at numerous schools throughout the United States, including the University of Iowa, Bennington College, and the University of Central Florida in Orlando. His best-known works include A Covenant with Death (1965), which was adapted into a Warner Brothers film starring Gene Hackman and George Maharis; When the War Is Over (1969), a Civil War novel based on the true story of a teenage Confederate soldier executed more than a month after Lee s surrender; and the Far East trilogy of literary adventure novels: The Chinese Bandit (1975), The Last Mandarin (1979), and The Blue-Eyed Shan (1982). Equally distinguished as a translator, a biographer, a commentator on the popular arts, and a novelist, Stephen Becker brings to his fiction a breadth of experience with world culture and human behavior which yields moral complexity and psychological verity in his work. Two major themes intertwine through his novels the problems of justice and the necessity for self-knowledge and self-fulfillment. Becker's examination of society's structure and limitations and his portrayal of men seeking "grace under pressure" is a significant contribution to contemporary fiction. The existential premises of the works individuals finding meaning inside the arbitrary bounds of social order reflect our acceptance of the civilization we have built. Derived from a Kirkus review: Becker's triumph in this novel is to show a slice of army life as it might have been and can be in any era for the foot soldiers enduring most of the risk and all of the rules that govern the military. A few pages into the story and you recognize the closing days of the Civil War, when Lt. Marius Catto was seriously, but not fatally, wounded by Thomas Martin, a teenaged Kentuckian who claimed to be a sworn member of Col. Jessee's Confederate raiders. Even Catto believed the boy, although Martin had no papers, no uniform, no arms, and no insignia to identify him as a proper soldier. So regulations defined him as a guerrilla and directed that he be shot. Catto's unit and prisoner Martin were posted to the Cincinnati barracks, where the corruption of systematic inactivity affected Catto's character and was also reflected in the disintegration of his unit which had been an effective team in battle. Martin's case was postponed once at firing squad point, but General Hooker insisted, despite the combined efforts of his staff and especially Catto, that Martin be shot. The letter of the law was carried out and, in brief sketches of the postwar careers of the men involved, Becker shows how crippling was this compliance with printed rules--the failure to allow circumstances to alter cases destroyed them all. Understated irony, characterization through dialogue, and a superb story superbly told.
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