Looking for War

Douglas Unger's fiction is sharp-edged and compelling, whether he's exploring his own boyhood on the street ("Autobiography") or the life of a student lab assistant who bonds with a burnt-out rhesus monkey ("Leslie and Sam") or the strange fate of a young woman who returns from a second honeymoon on a paradisiacal Brazilian island to succumb to a mysterious disease ("Tide Pool"). The collection is capped by the powerful novella "Looking for War," where a would-be war correspondent, whose older brother is a shell-shocked Vietnam vet, stumbles upon his own war in a grisly five-minute action in the jungles of Paraguay. Douglas Unger is as sensitive and knowledgeable about matters of the heart as he is about war.