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|  | | A Temporary Sort Of Peace
James McGarrah's A Temporary Sort of Peace belongs on the same
shelf with the great memoirs of the Vietnam War, including Michael
Herr's Dispatches and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried.
McGarrah chronicles his Vietnam experience, his years growing up
in southern Indiana, and his return, now altered, to that once-
familiar landscape, in a voice both lyrical and deeply felt. McGarrah
never flinches from the truth. This book is a must-read for anyone
who wants to understand the lasting effects of war.
Susan Neville
Demia Butler Professor of English
Growing up in Princeton, Indiana, during the 1950s, Jim McGarrah spent his days pursuing dreams of athletic glory on the baseball diamond, becoming captain of his high school's baseball team, and winning, for a time, the affections of a blond cheerleader, escorting her to dates at the local drive-in in his 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air. Although he earned a baseball scholarship to college, McGarrah flunked out of school in May 1967 and, on the way home, enlisted for service in the U.S. Marine Corps, causing his father, a veteran of World War II, to warn him he had no idea what he had just done. In | |  | | Going Postal
Fiction story that follows a twenty year span in the life of a Walter Mitty-type character through middle-aged crisis.
Veteran of a bad war, child of the sixties counterculture, philosopher, family man, and failed spiritual leader for a congregation of two, John Grant struggles to make sense of his existential malaise and survive its strangling hold on his life while working for the United States Postal Service.. Grant is a dope-smoking darker Walter Mitty. His one touchstone with reality, wife Rhonda, leaves him and he must struggle alone with the complicated questions that often arise in a mid-life crisis, surrounded by a cast of characters even stranger than his own post-Vietnam delusions. Contending wit | |  | | Running the Voodoo Down
These poems are fierce and unflinching. McGarrah makes a difficult life on the page, one that is relentlessly personal and historical. Here are bruised, shamed, restless elegies wrestling to give us a collection that is beautiful and unafraid of its own shadow.
Victoria Redel
| |  | | The End of an Era
An insightful, heartbreaking and, at times, hilarious account of McGarrah's struggles as a veteran in the aftermath of war.
| |  | | When the Stars Go Dark
award-winning collection of contemporary narrative poems.
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