The war, Stevie is told, with its white-tailed rockets and hard crack ricochets; the war, with its thumping whirl of trembling choppers; the war, with its shirtless gun crews manning steel wheeled cannons; the war, with its fine plumed shells cutting silver arcs through infinite sky; the war, with its lumbering tanks and sun bleached bunkers; the war, with its steep, lush highlands, emerald lattice of checkerboard paddies; the war, with its mangled torsos triaged too late; the war, he is told on scheduled clinic days, had ended quite some time ago. Through fiction and non fiction, Stevie and...

"This book is a rare gift. Using a spare style that startles with its directness, Marc Levy transforms the dreams of almost forty years into what often feel like surreal prose poems, with disturbingly realistic details of war juxtaposed with domestic details of childhood and civilian life. One minute the dreamer is in Vietnam, the next he's in a childhood park; he's a school child, an adolescent, but simultaneously a soldier. His brother, his parents, his dog appear; familiar objects-an umbrella, a small balsa wood plane-create disconcerting contrasts with weapons of war. There's emotional...