Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails, Anthony Swofford
Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails, Anthony Swofford
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Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails
A Memoir

Author: Anthony Swofford

Narrator: Anthony Swofford

Unabridged: 8 hr 23 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Twelve

Published: 06/05/2012


Synopsis

The publication of Jarhead launched a new career for Anthony Swofford, earning him accolades for its gritty and unexpected portraits of the soldiers who fought in the Gulf War. It spawned a Hollywood movie. It made Swofford famous and wealthy. It also nearly killed him.

Now with the same unremitting intensity he brought to his first memoir, Swofford describes his search for identity, meaning, and a reconciliation with his dying father in the years after he returned from serving as a sniper in the Marines. Adjusting to life after war, he watched his older brother succumb to cancer and his first marriage disintegrate, leading him to pursue a lifestyle in Manhattan that brought him to the brink of collapse. Consumed by drugs, drinking, expensive cars, and women, Swofford lost almost everything and everyone that mattered to him.

When a son is in trouble he hopes to turn to his greatest source of wisdom and support: his father. But Swofford and his father didn't exactly have that kind of relationship. The key, he realized, was to confront the man-a philandering, once hard-drinking, now terminally ill Vietnam vet he had struggled hard to understand and even harder to love. The two stubborn, strong-willed war vets embarked on a series of RV trips that quickly became a kind of reckoning in which Swofford took his father to task for a lifetime of infidelities and abuse. For many years Swofford had considered combat the decisive test of a man's greatness. With the understanding that came from these trips and the fateful encounter that took him to a like-minded woman named Christa, Swofford began to understand that becoming a father himself might be the ultimate measure of his life.

Elegantly weaving his family's past with his own present-nights of excess and sexual conquest, visits with injured war veterans, and a near-fatal car crash-Swofford casts a courageous, insistent eye on both his father and himself in order to make sense of what his military service meant, and to decide, after nearly ending it, what his life can and should become as a man, a veteran, and a father.


About Anthony Swofford

Anthony Swofford served in a U.S. Marine Corps Surveillance and Target Acquisition/Scout-Sniper platoon during the Gulf War. After the war, he was educated at American River College; the University of California, Davis; and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has taught at the University of Iowa and Lewis and Clark College. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, Harper's, Men's Journal, The Iowa Review, and other publications. A Michener-Copernicus Fellowship recipient, he lives in New York.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Rebecca on December 28, 2012

I give "Hotels, Hospitals and Jails" a very reluctant two stars. Anthony Swofford is a good writer and the book was somewhat entertaining but I really don't like him as a person and found a lot of the book really annoying. I wouldn't have finished it if it were something I were actually reading (I l......more

Goodreads review by Anne on July 06, 2012

Asshole son writes about his asshole dad.......more

Goodreads review by Nicolemauerman on September 02, 2012

This book is about life after success for Anthony Swofford. In this memoir the author discusses his life after writing the popular Jarhead (which was also made into a movie). Basically, he lived a fast life: slept with multiple woman in a day, drove his car so fast and carelessly that he smashed it......more

Goodreads review by Roger on November 14, 2016

The mood Swofford creates in his memoir feels like an adrenaline rush. His recollections are lucid, frenetic, edgy, unabashed, and unapologetic. Each chapter scintillates with explosive prose and the pacing moves fast, but some chapters sting with insight while others, though interesting, feel like......more

Goodreads review by Renee on July 12, 2013

I picked up this audio book by chance at the library (written by the author of Jarhead), and felt like I was carrying an elephant on my chest as I read. Swofford describes his search for identity, meaning, and reconciliation with his dying father in the years after he returned from serving as a snip......more