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Audiobook8 hours
Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails: A Memoir
Published by Hachette Audio
Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars
2.5/5
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About this audiobook
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.
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.
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Reviews for Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails
Rating: 2.600003 out of 5 stars
2.5/5
10 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5kind of unpleasant. i also have unpleasant family relationships and i know no one wants to hear about them. why does he expect his father to be different? if he wants to see him, he'll have to accept him the way he is. the only person you can change is yourself. why do men continue to look for respect from their unrespectable unloving fathers? just stay away from the shitheads.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I was so excited to get this book, because I love Anthony Swofford and absolutely adored Jarhead. But. Just couldn't do it with this one. The writing here and the narrative quality is gorgeous, it's just the subject matter of the father and son relationship over time and all of Swoffords various relationship exploits just didn't grab me at all. I don't think I'll try to pick this up later.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5One of the worst memoirs I've ever read. The author spends the whole book bragging about his sexual prowess and conquests while berating his own father for the same activities. Toward the end he tries to claim moral high ground by claiming (I paraphrase) "I did all my oat-sowing in my thirties, you did it while you were married. I'd never do that to my wife and children." Conveniently IGNORING the fact that he was already married and fucked around on his first wife. This isn't even the worst of his sins.
He endlessly whines about being disciplined 30 years in the past, even reminisces about how he gets together with friends to talk about their fathers. What the shit? You are a grown ass adult who has been to war. Quit bitching and grow up.
The author moans about his daddy issues so hard that for the first 200 pages one gets the impression that his mother is dead. Nope. She eventually shows up, with no mention of when why or if they ever divorced.
Then there is the section where he disrespects his family by refusing to accept a token award from the Daughters of the Confederacy.
This is navel-gazing, self-aggrandizing, braggadocious bullshit from beginning to end by an effete nancy boy. Avoid at all costs.