Word: becker
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WHEN THE WAR IS OVER, by Stephen Becker. An excellent period morality tale about a Union Army officer who attempts to save the life of a teen-age Rebel who shot him during a Civil War skirmish...
WHEN THE WAR IS OVER by Stephen Becker. 240 pages. Random House...
Like Diogenes, Stephen Becker has spent most of his career as a novelist searching for an honest man-or at least a protagonist who can face a tough moral decision with honesty. In A Covenant with Death, a youthful judge must decide the fate of a man who kills his executioner after being convicted of a murder that he did not commit. Juice concerns a wealthy businessman fighting the machinery mobilized to exonerate him of the drunken-driving death of a pedestrian. Now, in his sixth novel, Becker, 42, turns back to the Civil War. In an excellent period morality...
...Becker's story is based on a real incident. On May 11, 1865, 32 days after Lee surrendered and 18 days before President Andrew Johnson declared an amnesty for all rebel soldiers, a Union firing squad executed Thomas Martin outside Cincinnati for being a Confederate guerrilla-even though the case against him was never proved...
...impact of the book is a shocking and melancholy reminder that men, in war or peace, always must go on living with an accumulation of such crimes. Becker quotes the real Judge William Martin Dickson of Cincinnati, writing after the boy's death: "But why revive these harrowing incidents of the war? As well ask, why tell the story of the war at all? If it is to be told, let us have the whole. Let the young not be misled." Like Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. Stephen Becker's book explores the whole...