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Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
Ben Fountain
HarperCollins
May 2012
On Sale: May 1, 2012
Featuring: Billy Lynn
320 pages ISBN: 0060885599 EAN: 9780060885595 Kindle: B00655KLOY Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction Family Life
A ferocious firefight with Iraqi insurgents at "the battle
of Al-Ansakar Canal"—three minutes and forty-three seconds
of intense warfare caught on tape by an embedded Fox News
crew—has transformed the eight surviving men of Bravo Squad
into America's most sought-after heroes. For the past two
weeks, the Bush administration has sent them on a
media-intensive nationwide Victory Tour to
reinvigorate public support for the war. Now, on this chilly
and rainy Thanksgiving, the Bravos are guests of America's
Team, the Dallas Cowboys, slated to be part of the halftime
show alongside the superstar pop group Destiny's Child. Among the Bravos is the Silver Starwinning hero of
Al-Ansakar Canal, Specialist William Lynn, a
nineteen-year-old Texas native. Amid clamoring patriots
sporting flag pins on their lapels and Support Our Troops
bumper stickers on their cars, the Bravos are thrust into
the company of the Cowboys' hard-nosed businessman/owner and
his coterie of wealthy colleagues; a luscious born-again
Cowboys cheerleader; a veteran Hollywood producer; and
supersized pro players eager for a vicarious taste of war.
Among these faces Billy sees those of his family—his worried
sisters and broken father—and Shroom, the philosophical
sergeant who opened Billy's mind and died in his arms at
Al-Ansakar. Over the course of this day, Billy will begin to understand
difficult truths about himself, his country, his struggling
family, and his brothers-in-arms—soldiers both dead and
alive. In the final few hours before returning to Iraq,
Billy will drink and brawl, yearn for home and mourn those
missing, face a heart-wrenching decision, and discover pure
love and a bitter wisdom far beyond his years. Poignant, riotously funny, and exquisitely heartbreaking,
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is a devastating
portrait of our time, a searing and powerful novel that
cements Ben Fountain's reputation as one of the finest
writers of his generation.
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