Battle Fatigue (15 page)

Acknowledgments

Thanks to my agent, Charlotte Sheedy, one of those “draft counselors” I wrote about; and to my good friend and publisher, George Gibson, who is the smartest baseball fan I know; and to Nancy Miller, who at last count has edited seventeen of my books—isn't that some kind of record? Also my thanks to Emily Easton, Mary Kate Castellani, and all the people at Bloomsbury and Walker who have taken such painstaking care with this book. Thanks to Marian and Talia for understanding my unpopular ideas.

Also to the memory of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and more than a dozen other civil rights workers, millions of Vietnamese, and 58,267 Americans whose violent deaths filled my youth with a sadness from which I can never recover, a sadness that gives a wisdom that is at the heart of this book.

Also by Mark Kurlansky

NONFICTION

Hank Greenberg

The Eastern Stars

The Food of a Younger Land

The Last Fish Tale

Nonviolence

The Big Oyster

1968

Salt

The Basque History of the World

Cod

A Chosen Few

A Continent of Islands

What?

ANTHOLOGY

Choice Cuts

FICTION

Edible Stories

Boogaloo on 2nd Avenue

The White Man in the Tree and Other Stories

TRANSLATION

Belly of Paris
by Emile Zola

FOR CHILDREN

The Story of Salt

The Girl Who Swam to Euskadi

The Cod's Tale

World Without Fish

Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin, New York and Sydney

First published in Great Britain in November 2011 by
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

First published in the USA in 2011 by Walker Publishing Company
a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010

This electronic edition published in November 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Text copyright © Mark Kurlansky 2011

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Lyrics
here
from “I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag”; words and music
by Joe McDonald © 1965 Alkatraz Corner Music Co. Used by permission

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 4088 2963 9

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