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Author of Talk to Me, James Dean and Cold Deck, H. Lee Barnes is an
eloquent ambassador for the contemporary American West. In these
twelve moving stories, Barnes delves deep into the wild, expansive
places of the region and of the human heart that are slowly coming
to rein. With gorgeously distilled prose, Barnes writes of vastness
and distance, of the separate, small inches and whole histories
that occupy equal measures of the western spirit. Each of the
stories in Life Is a Country Western Song reveals a character
longing to close a gap, or who, for better and for worse, have come
to terms with their estrangement and exile. A divorcee rekindles a
doomed romance over the internet; a locksmith absorbs broken dreams
in foreclosed homes; a boy learns how to love and hate in Juarez,
Mexico; because he has no one else, a Nevada Patrolman confides his
marital troubles in a dog. Wrought with empathy, precision and a
steady finger on the pulse of the complexities facing today’s
changing, often turbulent West, Barnes’s stories show a writer at
the apex of his craft, offering an updated take on a West that is
rapidly descending into the annals of legend.
There is the mythology of the Green Berets, of their clandestine,
special operations as celebrated in story and song. And then there
is the reality of one soldier’s experience, the day-to-day loss
and drudgery of a Green Beret such as H. Lee Barnes, whose story
conveys the daily grind and quiet desperation behind
polished-for-public-consumption accounts of military heroics. In
When We Walked Above the Clouds, Barnes tells what it was like to
be a Green Beret, first in the Dominican Republic during the civil
war of 1965, and then at A-107, Tra Bong, Vietnam. There, he
eventually came to serve as the advisor to a Combat Recon Platoon,
which consisted chiefly of Montagnard irregulars. Though “nothing
extraordinary,” as Barnes saw it, his months of simply doing what
the mission demanded make for sobering reading: the mundane
business of killing rats, cleaning guns, and building bunkers
renders the intensity of patrols and attacks all the more
harrowing. More than anything, Barnes’s story is one of
loss—of morale lost to alcoholism, teammates lost to friendly
fire, missions aborted, and missions endlessly and futilely
repeated. As the story advances, so does the attrition—teammates
transferred, innocence cast off, confidence in leadership whittled
away. And yet, against this dark background, Barnes still manages
to honor the quiet professionals whose service, overshadowed by the
outsized story of Vietnam, nonetheless carried the day.
Purchase the audio edition.
This is the extraordinary first-person account of a young woman's
coming of age in Somalia and her struggles against the obligations
and strictures of family and society. By the time she is nine, Aman
has undergone a ritual circumcision ceremony; at eleven, her
innocent romance with a white boy leads to a murder; at thirteen
she is given away in an arranged marriage to a stranger. Aman
eventually runs away to Mogadishu, where her beauty and rebellious
spirit leads her to the decadent demimonde of white colonialists.
Hers is a world in which women are both chattel and freewheeling
entrepreneurs, subject to the caprices of male relatives, yet
keenly aware of the loopholes that lead to freedom. Aman is an
astonishing history, opening a window onto traditional Somali life
and the universal quest for female self-awareness.
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