War's Wake: How a GI-Bill veteran and a sophomore lost their way in the time of Harry Truman and Alger Hiss and fell into paradise on a magical island in Washington Park

Set on the campus of a western university and a magical island—a sort of Garden of Eden—in a nearby city park, War’s Wake is a bittersweet story of lost love. As the tale plays out it is also a bit of subtle spoofing of compulsive romance and the manners, mores, and politics of the greatest generation’s immediate postwar period. For the old infantry sergeant, reentry into civil society was not all beds of roses framed with white picket fences.

Lost love, however, is not always to be lamented, particularly when transformed to a fairytale in the blurred light of a bygone time. Drawing upon imagination stimulated by a bevy of old photographs from his high school and college years before and after World War II, the author has created a seductive novel of autobiographic fiction taking the reader into fantasy worlds that never were but might have been. The photographs, appearing at the end of the narrative, give a powerful authenticity to the fiction, making it almost believable amid all of its bizarre fancies and contradictions. We accept because who among us has not envisaged lives different from those we have actually experienced?