Taps: A Novel
Books / Paperback
ISBN: 0618219021 / Publisher: Mariner Books, April 2002
In a final work by the author of My Dog Skip, sixteen-year-old Mississippi boy Swayze Barksdale is called upon to play "Taps" at the funerals of his neighborhood's young Korean War casualties and comes into a more mature understanding of friendship, love, and patriotism. Reprint.
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The final work from one of America's most beloved authors and an instant classic, TAPS takes readers on one last fictional journey to Willie Morris's South and spins a tender, powerful, very American story about the vanishing beauty of a charmed way of life and the fleeting boyhood of a young man coming of age in a time of war. In Fisk's Landing, Mississippi, at the dawn of the Korean War, sixteen-year-old Swayze Barksdale is suddenly called to an unexpected duty - playing "Taps" at the gravesides of the town's young casualties sent home from the front. Gradually, Swayze begins to pace his life around these all too frequent funerals, where his horn sounds the tragic note of the times. At turns funny, at turns poignant, TAPS abounds with colorful characters and yet "sings and sighs . . . with a kind of minor key wistfulness" (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette) as Swayze learns what it means to be a patriot, a son, a lover, a friend, a man.
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