Censured by some critics for its brutality, while heralded by others as a modern-day classic, Sympathy for the Devil is a terrifying, intoxicating journey through the violence, madness, and insane beauty of battle. It traces the story of a hardened Green Beret named Hanson, a college student who goes to war with a book of Yeats's poetry in his pocket and discovers the savagery within himself. In this extraordinary novel, we follow Hanson through two tours of duty and a bitter attempt to live as a civilian in between. At one with the lush and dangerous world around him in Vietnam, it is Hanson's doom to survive the landscape of devastation he encounters. Sympathy for the Devil contains some of the most vivid, finely etched prose ever written about the actual process of war--from firing a weapon for the first time in battle to the moment a young man knows that he has entered a living hell and found a home....
About the Author :
Kent Anderson is a former police officer, a former Special Forces sergeant in Vietnam, and the author of Night Dogs. He lives in Idaho.
Review :
Kent Anderson "has outwritten just about everybody who preceded him in trying to make fictional sense out of the war....a very brave book."
--Peter Straub, The Washington Post Book World "Anderson's work is chilling and authentic."
--Oliver Stone
"Anderson has a profundity found with novelists of the human experience who have observed, can interpret and then carry us back to smell, hear and bleed."
--Los Angeles Times
"Tear[s] like a burst of tracers through the field of Vietnam War literature...riveting."
--Dale A. Dye, Captain, U.S.M.C. (Ret.), author of the novel Platoon
"A remarkably good book. Kent Anderson does what only great writers can do. He looks at the world and he sees what's there."
--Bestselling author Robert B. Parker
"Graphic, grippingly authentic."
--Publishers Weekly
Don't miss Kent Anderson's Night Dogs:
"The best and truest novel about crime and the police I have ever read."
--James Patterson
"Fiercely authentic and deeply disturbing...Extraordinary."
--Los Angeles Times
"The best I've ever read about cop life on the streets."
--The Philadelphia Inquirer
Available wherever Bantam Books are sold
