Mayhem Was Our Business: Memorias De UN Veterano

Rating:
Summary: Brilliantly and concisely written remembrance of World War 2
Review: Although this book is written after the Tierra Amarilla series, it is concise and easier to understand than his earlier works by the student of the Spanish language. I found it hard to hold back the tears of sympathy for his experiences. At the end of the last chapter, I wished that it were volume one of six volumes.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant account of one man's war that is everyman's.
Review: Intense individual recollections, exquisitely shared, flow into collective memory and become history when they are given to us in the way Ulibarri has done. The balance between self and other has been brilliantly struck and lets his readers participate in the gift given to us by all who have fought in war and experienced life at its most awesome and intense. When I put it down, I felt the weight of a great novel of hundreds and hundreds of pages. Yet it is so carefully and tightly crafted a tale, so few words, so few pages, which become a flash-point of the most intense and violent of life experience combined with the breadth and depth of the most delicate of human emotions. An overwhelming account of the perilous, frightening, best, and most noble of our human condition.