Fever and Guts: A Symphony

Jerry D. Mathes’ Fever and Guts is hard-hitting literary nonfiction. Reminiscent of the exacting sharpness found in Hemingway’s bullfighting stories and as deeply reflective as Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Mathes takes his readers to the fringes of American society, a subculture where war stories are handed down from fathers to sons and then are lived by those sons; where fathers brace against the weather of daughters’ illnesses; where language and speech is music, poetry, and vio...