LitPicks Book Reviews—December 2012

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
Ben Fountain, 2012
320 pp.

Book Review by Molly Lundquist
December, 2012
Acerbic, heart-wrenching, and at times out-right hilarious, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk has been hailed as the new Catch 22 or Slaughterhouse-Five. It's also a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award. (The winner—as of 3/2013!)

The story follows eight young soldiers of Bravo Squad, who find themselves national heroes after fighting bravely in Iraq—action caught on camera by a Fox news crew. Now they're on a Victory Tour of the U.S. to gin up support for the war.

The Yellow Birds
Kevin Powers, 2012
226 pp.

Book Review by Molly Lundquist
December, 2012
"The war tried to kill us," reports the narrator in the opening lines of this powerful book on the Iraq war. For 21-year-old John Bartle, the events of that war prove so searing he cannot escape the memories.

He is trapped, like the coal mine canaries who when set free fly right back to their cages. Cages are all the birds know—they're held back by the memory of their only existence.

Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut, 1969
224 pp.

Book Review by Molly Lundquist
December, 2012
A movie producer once told Kurt Vonnegut that if he was planning to write an anti-war book he might as well write an anti-glacier book—for all the good it would do. Wars are inevitable, "about as easy to stop as glaciers" was his point. Vonnegut agreed.

Why then go on to publish a novel—on the firebombing of Dresden at the end of World War II—that will become one of the world's great anti-war novels? It seems, as the author himself explains, Slaughterhouse-Five was the book he had to write: he was in Dresden when it blew up.