Karl Marlantes Libri

A stunningly expansive family saga of anguish, reinvention and courage from the bestselling author of Matterhorn.

In 1968, at 22, Karl Marlantes left his Oxford scholarship to serve in the US Marine Corps during the Vietnam War. The experience over thirteen months in the jungles of Southeast Asia profoundly impacted him, revealing the chaos of a conflict defined only by kill ratios and body counts. Returning home adorned with medals, he found the aftermath even more challenging. It took him four decades to confront his experiences, during which he created a fictionalized account of his war in MATTERHORN, recognized as a definitive Vietnam novel. WHAT IT IS LIKE TO GO TO WAR revisits Vietnam without the fictional lens, presenting the hard-earned truths that informed MATTERHORN. This work serves as an exorcism of Marlantes's combat experiences, a confession, and a philosophical guide for those about to face war. It offers a candid exploration of what it means to be a soldier, confront death, and take a life. Through this unflinching narrative, Marlantes provides insight into the profound complexities and emotional toll of war, revealing the stark realities that soldiers endure both on the battlefield and after they return home.

"Helsinki, 1947. Finland teeters between the Soviet Union and the West. Everyone is being watched. A wrong look or a wrong word could end in catastrophe. Natalya Bobrova, from Russia, and Louise Koski, from the United States, are young wives of their country's military attachâes. When they meet at an embassy party, their husbands, Arnie and Mikhail, both world-class skiers, drunkenly challenge each other to a friendly-but secret-cross-country wilderness race. Louise is delighted, but Natalya is worried. Stalin and Beria's secret police rule with unforgiving brutality. If news of the race gets out and Mikhail loses, Natalya knows it would mean his death, her imprisonment, and the loss of her two children. Meanwhile, Louise, who is childless, uses the race as an opportunity to raise money for a local orphanage, naive to the danger it will bring to Natalya and her family. Too late to stop Louise's scheme, a horrified Natalya watches as news of the race spreads across the globe as newspapers and politicians spin it as a symbolic battle: freedom versus communism. Desperate to undo her mistake, Louise must reach Arnie to tell him to throw the race and save Mikhail-but how? The two racers are in a world of their own, unreachable in Finland's arctic wilderness."--