Pantheon Books

Just in time for Veterans Day, Peter Behrens, author of the upcoming The O’Briens, has written a piece for The Huffington Post:

I find much to admire in their attitude but there was also a price to pay for all that silence about the disorienting experience of modern war. As they grew old, and faced their deaths, most of what had happened in the decades since their war seemed to recede, fade, lose shape and colour — and the hard kernels of dastardly memory grounded in those intense weeks and months in Europe, 1943, 1944, 1945, was all that remained, and were spilled out to me, the inquisitive writer/nephew, not in rehearsed anecdotage but in pellucid shards of raw memory; bits of memory like chunks of hot shrapnel, disconnected to any moral or meaning, scorching and dangerous.

Read the rest here.