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Book Reviewed by:From the National Book Award finalist, a breathtakingly spare and shattering new novel that traces the intersection of three star-crossed lives.
Eden Malcom lies in a bed, unable to move or to speak, imprisoned in his own mind. His wife Mary spends every day on the sofa in his hospital room. He has never even met their young daughter. And he will never again see the friend and fellow soldier who didn't make it back home - and who narrates the novel. But on Christmas, the one day Mary is not at his bedside, Eden's re-ordered consciousness comes flickering alive. As he begins to find a way to communicate, some troubling truths about his marriage - and about his life before he went to war - come to the surface. Is Eden the same man he once was: a husband, a friend, a father-to-be? What makes a life worth living? A piercingly insightful, deeply felt meditation on loyalty and betrayal, love and fear, Waiting for Eden is a tour de force of profound humanity.
Excerpt
Waiting for Eden
I want you to understand Mary and what she did. But I don't know if you will. You've got to wonder if in the end you'd make the same choice, circumstances being similar, or even the same, God help you. Back when I first met her and Eden times were better. They were trying to start a family then. And months later, on that night in the Hamrin Valley, I was sitting next to Eden and luckier than him when our Humvee hit a pressure plate, killing me and everybody else, him barely surviving.
Ever since then I've been around too, just on that other side, seeing all there is, and waiting.
Three years have gone by and my friend's spent every day of it laid out in that burn center in San Antonio. I could give you the catalogue of his injuries, but I won't. Not because I don't think you could stomach it, but because I don't think it'd really tell you much about what type of a way he's in. So I'll tell you this: he used ...
Make no mistake, the novel is a grim one, and there are no answers to these important questions within its pages; its graphic nature may also make it a challenging read for some. Nevertheless, I thought it was one of the most haunting narratives I’ve encountered in a long time, and I’ve continued to mull it over in the weeks since I read it; it was a powerful and affecting story. Waiting for Eden is my highest-rated book of the year to-date; its weighty themes make it an especially good choice for group discussion...continued
Full Review
(535 words)
(Reviewed by Kim Kovacs).
In Elliot Ackerman's novel Waiting for Eden, a pivotal scene is set at the Marine Corp's SERE school.
SERE is an acronym that stands for "Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape." Created by the U.S. Air Force at the end of World War II, the program was modeled after the experiences of British and US aviators who were able to evade and escape the enemy. In the 1950s and 1960s, CIA interrogation practices were incorporated. SERE was later shaped into its current format by LTC Nick Rowe who observed the deficiencies of the military's training techniques during his five years of captivity during the Vietnam War. SERE training methods were adopted by the other services with each branch developing their own specific curriculum...
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