{"id":25155,"date":"2022-09-07T11:59:30","date_gmt":"2022-09-07T16:59:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/?p=25155"},"modified":"2022-09-07T11:59:30","modified_gmt":"2022-09-07T16:59:30","slug":"obit-watch-september-7-2022","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/?p=25155","title":{"rendered":"Obit watch: September 7, 2022."},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter Straub<\/a>, noted writer.<\/p>\n

Mr. Straub was both a master of his genre and an anxious occupant of it. Novels like \u201cJulia\u201d (1975) and \u201cGhost Story\u201d (1979) helped revivify a once-creaking field, even though he insisted that his work transcended categorization and that he wrote how he wanted, only to watch readers and critics pigeonhole him as a horror novelist.<\/a>
\nNot that he could complain about what critics and readers thought. Starting with \u201cJulia,\u201d his third novel, about a woman who is haunted by a spirit that may or may not be her dead daughter, Mr. Straub won praise from reviewers and topped best seller charts with a type of story that had previously been sidelined as sub-literary.<\/a>
\n\u201cHe was a unique writer in a lot of ways,\u201d Mr. King said in a phone interview on Monday. \u201cHe was not only a literary writer with a poetic sensibility, but he was readable. And that was a fantastic thing. He was a modern writer, who was the equal of say, Philip Roth, though he wrote about fantastic things.\u201d<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…<\/p>\n

Though he was hardly as prolific as Mr. King, Mr. Straub continued to write best-selling books, not all of which involved horror. His \u201cBlue Rose\u201d trilogy \u2014 \u201cKoko\u201d (1988), \u201cMystery\u201d (1990) and \u201cThe Throat\u201d (1993) \u2014 revolve around the hunt for a serial killer. Though there is nothing supernatural about them, each book won a Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association, three of seven Stoker prizes that Mr. Straub accumulated.<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Dr. Ronald Glasser<\/a>. He was another one of those folks I had not heard of before, but he wrote a highly acclaimed book, 365 Days<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Dr. Glasser was opposed to the war when he was drafted in August 1968.<\/a>
\nHe was assigned to a hospital in Zama, Japan \u2014 one of four frenetic Army hospitals in Japan that every month were receiving 6,000 to 8,000 injured troops airlifted from the battlefields of Vietnam during their 365-day tours of duty.<\/a>
\nDr. Glasser was originally assigned as a pediatrician to treat the families of military dependents in Japan. But, he wrote, \u201cI soon realized that the troopers they were pulling off those medevac choppers were only children themselves.\u201d<\/a>
\n\u201c365 Days,\u201d published in 1971, was a finalist for the National Book Award. The playwright David Mamet hailed it in The Wall Street Journal as \u201cthe best book to come out of Vietnam, and yet the author wasn\u2019t stationed there.\u201d<\/a>
\nDr. Glasser explained in \u201c365 Days\u201d that he had never intended to become a writer, but that he felt compelled to record what he had seen and heard at the hospital. He dedicated the book to Stephen Crane, the author of the novel \u201cThe Red Badge of Courage,\u201d which vividly described the bloody battlegrounds of the Civil War.<\/a>
\n\u201cI did not start writing for months, and even then it was only to tell what I was seeing and being told, maybe to give something to these kids that was all theirs without doctrine or polemics, something that they could use to explain what they might not be able to explain themselves,\u201d Dr. Glasser wrote.<\/a>
\n\u201cAs for me,\u201d he continued, \u201cmy wish is not that I had never been in the Army, but that this book could never have been written.\u201d<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…<\/p>\n

Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who was a national security adviser in the Trump administration and is now a senior fellow at Stanford University\u2019s Hoover Institution, characterized Dr. Glasser in an email as \u201cone of the most humane men I have ever met\u201d and said that what distinguished him was \u201chis description of war and the experiences of those who fight, sacrifice and suffer\u201d and \u201chis empathy for those he treated and to whom he listened\u201d \u2014 including his fellow doctors and nurses.<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…<\/p>\n

The book was banned from some public libraries because it liberally quoted the soldiers\u2019 use of profanity. Dr. Glasser was unapologetic.<\/a>
\n\u201cThe truth as I saw it was that common language failed,\u201d he testified in a court case contesting the ban. \u201cIt didn\u2019t express their anguish. It wasn\u2019t enough.\u201d<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Straub, noted writer. Mr. Straub was both a master of his genre and an anxious occupant of it. Novels like \u201cJulia\u201d (1975) and \u201cGhost Story\u201d (1979) helped revivify a once-creaking field, even though he insisted that his work transcended categorization and that he wrote how he wanted, only to watch readers and critics pigeonhole […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,97,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-history","category-obits"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25155"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25155\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25156,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25155\/revisions\/25156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}