| Tonight on TDS, author Sebastian Junger is on to promote his new book, War; and on TCR, it's Hampton Sides, author of Hellhound on his Trail |
Junger is most noted for his 1997 book The Perfect Storm, later adapted into a film by the same name. Junger's most recent book, War, deals with his experiences being embedded with the 173rd Airborne Brigade. The book earned a favorable review from the Washington
Post's Philip Caputo:
With his narrative gifts and vivid prose -- as free, thank God, of literary posturing as it is of war-correspondent chest-thumping -- Junger masterfully chronicles the platoon's 15-month tour of duty. But what elevates "War" out of its particular time and place are the author's meditations on the minds and emotions of the soldiers with whom he has shared hardships, dangers and spells of boredom so intense that everyone sits around wishing to hell something would happen (and wishes to God
it was over when, inevitably, it does).
Hampton Sides is another journalist-writer type, previously known for his book 2001. Ghost Soldiers. His urrent book, Hellbound on his Trail, deals with thae assassination of Rev.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
I found fewer reviews of Hellhound, but what I did find positive:
But "Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin" isn't a psychological biography of Ray, à la Norman Mailer's "Oswald's Ghost." It's an exhaustively researched, fast-paced and at times minute-by-minute telling that switches between Ray and King, from the killer's jailbreak from a Jefferson City, Mo., prison, to an exhausted and dispirited King's ceaseless travels, to the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968, to the massive international manhunt that resulted in the increasingly desperate Ray's capture at London's Heathrow airport. To Sides' great credit, this is a feat of shoe-leather reporting and research. "Every scene is supported by the historical record. Every atmospheric detail arises from the factual evidence. And every conversation is reconstructed from documents." This is how it's done, folks.
So sit back and enjoy the show, everyone!