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(More customer reviews)The short stories and poems in this anthology are an important contribution to imaginative literature about war. Viewed from many perspectives and points in time--as an overwhelming presence, memory, and presentiment--war in these texts casts a dark shadow over human life, pushing all other concerns aside and twisting the reality of peacetime out of recognition. War is one of the movers of history, and history, as Auden tells us, is "made by the criminal in us." But while depicting or reflecting the criminality of war, the works in this anthology also offer examples of kindness, humanity, and hope. By presenting how things are, they also seem to tell us--as literature does when at its best--that that is not how things should be. For the soldier in Thom Brucie's story "A Deepening Heart," saving a mule's life becomes an act of love and redemption amid the senseless killing in the American Civil War. In Marko Vesovic''s poem "A Deathless Moment," two beautiful girls running across a street to avoid sniper fire in the besieged Sarajevo display a delightful, life-affirming rage at the sharpshooters. In Hunter Liguore's story "Pieces," a man, in unarticulated, desperate protest against continual massacres in a city, keeps picking up body parts of victims. Starved and numb to everything after what he has experienced on the Eastern Front on the eve of Germany's final defeat, a German soldier seeks a measure of human warmth in the embrace of an old woman (John Guzlowski, "The German"). In Nora Piehl's story "Going Somewhere, or Coming Back?" a sympathetic woman in a northern Minnesota town briefly steps into the life of a veteran tormented by memories of war.
These and other moments, in addition to its other qualities, make this anthology well worth reading and remebering.--Omer Hadziselimovic
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CONTRIBUTORS:Muhammad Ashfaq; Thom Brucie; John Gifford; John Guzlowski; Alamgir Hashmi; Margaret Kingsbury; Geoffrey A. Landis; Mitch Levenberg; Hunter Liguore; Mira Martin-Parker; Rebecca Newth; Norah Piehl; Nahid Rachlin; C.R. Resetarits; Nancy Riecken; Dawn Sandahl; Lisa L. Siedlarz; Lisa M. Sita; Patty Somlo; Marko Vesovic; Jenny D. Williams.FOREWORD by Wendy Galgan, Ph.D.EDITED BY Scholar, Professor, and Pushcart Prize nominee, Gregory F. Tague, Ph.D. Twenty-one authors - thirty-seven works (short stories and poems) from all over the world - writing about the physical and psychological ravages of war on individuals and families
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