emilyenger

A few years before my mother died, I began interviewing her and making notes. After her death in January 2010, I discovered a treasure trove: 200 years of our family history locked in the chickenhouse—about seventy feet from the old farmhouse where she and I had visited. Over the next eight years I studied and …

It’s one thing to write a book; it’s another to live it. Wendell Affield never knew his father. His childhood was punctuated by a volatile mother and an unpredictable stepfather. At twelve, he and his siblings were placed in foster homes, his mother committed to a mental hospital. At sixteen, he rode the rails out …

WWII veteran Herman Affield returns to his bleak farm in northern Minnesota and begins a four year search for a wife through lonely hearts club publications. Follow his search as the years tick by. Barbara – alias, Linda – a mentally ill New York pianist, finally answers his letters and moves to the farm with …

Muddy Jungle Rivers, the author’s memoir, is a close-up look at life on a gunboat during 1968, the bloodiest year of the Vietnam War. It’s the story of a seven-man crew captained by a volatile, pro-war enlisted man. Like Philip Caputo’s A Rumor Of War, this narrative takes the reader into frustration, rage, terror, death, …

…I found this book compelling, chilling and intensely real. The experience of being there with a slice of American youth good and bad, the tension of frequently being on edge, the horror of battle and being wounded severely is the start, but the rejection upon returning home and carrying all of those feelings for the …