Available:*
Material Type | Library | Call Number | Suggested Age | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Book | Searching... Cabell County Public Library | 921 MAHARIDGE MAH | Adult | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Milton Public Library | 921 MAHARIDGE MAH | Adult | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Putnam Main Public Library | 921 MAHARIDGE MAH | Adult | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
Now an Audible Original "THE DEAD DRINK FIRST"
Sergeant Steve Maharidge returned from World War II an angry man. For a long time, the only evidence that remained of his service in the Marines was a photograph of himself and a buddy that he tacked to the basement wall. When his son, Dale Maharidge, set out to discover what happened to the friend in the photograph, he found that wars do not end when the guns go quiet. The scars and demons remain for decades. Bringing Mulligan Home is a story of fathers and sons, war, and what was, for some, a long postwar.
Author Notes
Dale Maharidge has been teaching at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University since 2001. Before that he was a visiting professor at Stanford University for ten years and spent fifteen years as a newspaperman. Several of his books are illustrated with the work of photographer Michael S. Williamson. The first book, Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass (1985), later inspired Bruce Springsteen to write two songs; it was reissued in 1996 with an introduction by Springsteen. His second book, And Their Children After Them , won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1990.
Reviews (1)
Kirkus Review
The story of a distinguished journalist's search for his father's war. Pulitzer Prize winner Maharidge's (Journalism/Columbia Univ.; Homeland, 2011, etc.) father was a Marine sergeant who fought on Okinawa, where he suffered brain damage in an explosion that killed one of the men in his command, Herman Mulligan. Among the souvenirs the elder Maharidge brought home was an omnipresent photograph of himself and Mulligan, as well as sporadic explosive rages that terrified the author throughout his childhood. Maharidge received no diagnosis or treatment for his injury and refused to talk about the war to the end of his days. After his death, the author, "a person obsessed with the past and what I could not heal," set out to discover the truth about his father's wartime experiences, learn who Mulligan was and, if possible, locate his inexplicably unidentified gravesite. He conducted interviews with almost 30 elderly members of his father's company, and he presents 12 of them at length. He also traveled to Okinawa to visit the site of his father's injury and meet with civilian survivors of the battle in an effort to lay his father's demons to rest. The result is a moving memoir of the war by someone who wasn't there but who suffered from wartime injuries just as surely as his father had. The veterans' interviews are sensitively conducted, powerful and disturbing, graphic descriptions of brutal and largely unnecessary combat with a suicidally determined enemy, and frank accounts of atrocities committed by both sides. Equally importantly, some also explore the men's difficulties in re-entering civilian life, placing in context the elder Maharidge's often unsuccessful struggles to live with his experiences among people who could not imagine or understand them. A powerful narrative of the dark side of American combat in the Pacific theater and the persistence of resulting injuries decades after the war ended.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Table of Contents
| Introduction | p. xi |
| Part 1 Postwar | p. 1 |
| Part 2 Places and History | p. 65 |
| Part 3 Twelve Marines | p. 81 |
| Part 4 Island of Ghosts | p. 239 |
| Author's Notes | p. 305 |
| Bibliographical Notes | p. 311 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 317 |
