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Dust to Dust: A Memoir
“A wonderful book, original in concept and stunningly written.”—Ward Just
“Elegiac, funny, wistful, deep, and wonderfully human, Dust to Dust moved me to laughter and tears, sometimes simultaneously.”—Karl Marlantes, bestselling author of Matterhorn and What It Is Like to Go to War
Tim O’Brien meets Annie Dillard in this remarkable memoir by debut author Benjamin Busch. Much more than a war memoir, Dust to Dust brilliantly explores the passage through a lifetime—a moving meditation on life and death, the adventures of childhood and revelations of adulthood. Seemingly ordinary things take on a breathtaking radiance when examined by this decorated Marine officer—veteran of two combat tours in Iraq—actor on the hit HBO series The Wire, and son of acclaimed novelist Frederick Busch. Above all, Benjamin Busch is a truly extraordinary new literary talent as evidenced by his exemplary debut, Dust to Dust—an original, emotionally powerful, and surprisingly refreshing take on an American soldier’s story.
“Elegiac, funny, wistful, deep, and wonderfully human, Dust to Dust moved me to laughter and tears, sometimes simultaneously.”—Karl Marlantes, bestselling author of Matterhorn and What It Is Like to Go to War
Tim O’Brien meets Annie Dillard in this remarkable memoir by debut author Benjamin Busch. Much more than a war memoir, Dust to Dust brilliantly explores the passage through a lifetime—a moving meditation on life and death, the adventures of childhood and revelations of adulthood. Seemingly ordinary things take on a breathtaking radiance when examined by this decorated Marine officer—veteran of two combat tours in Iraq—actor on the hit HBO series The Wire, and son of acclaimed novelist Frederick Busch. Above all, Benjamin Busch is a truly extraordinary new literary talent as evidenced by his exemplary debut, Dust to Dust—an original, emotionally powerful, and surprisingly refreshing take on an American soldier’s story.
325 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 21, 2012
46 people are currently reading
733 people want to read
About the author
Benjamin Busch
14 books21 followersBenjamin Busch is an actor, writer, director and photographer. He served 16 years as an infantry and light armored reconnaissance officer in the United States Marine Corps, deploying to Iraq in 2003 and 2005. As an actor he is best know for his portrayal of Officer Anthony Colicchio in the HBO series The Wire, and he is the writer/director of the film, BRIGHT. He is the author of a memoir, Dust to Dust (Ecco/HarperCollins), and has published in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, and North American Review among others. He has been a contributor to NPR’s All Things Considered and The Daily Beast. He lives in Reed City, Michigan with his wife and their two daughters.
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February 26, 2012
Benjamin Busch's memoir, DUST TO DUST, is a piece of work that is at once puzzling and moving. Puzzling because I wondered how a Vassar graduate who had majored in studio art could seem so easily conversant about things like soil and stone, metal and water, ash and bone - things one would normally associate with earth sciences, geology or archaeology. And moving because, by using these elements as primary symbols and vehicles for telling his life story, he touches too on the pain of extended family separations, injuries and wounds, loss of comrades-in-arms and loved ones, and the grief and hard-won wisdom that follow.
Some readers may have trouble with the spiraling, circular narrative, which jumps from his solitary childhood enterprises and adventures to his war-time service as a Marine officer in Iraq, then back to that childhood in upstate New York and Maine. He tells too of his college years, interspersed with more tales of his military training in Virginia, North Carolina and California, his deployments to Ukraine and Korea, and trips as a child and young man to England. What emerges is a portrait of a boy and a man with a boundless curiosity about the world he inhabits and how he fits into it. His whole life Busch has struggled against rules and expectations, endlessly experimenting and daring to be different. The son of a novelist (Frederick Busch) father and librarian mother, Busch grew up with a healthy respect for books, but was drawn more to exploring the forests, fields and streams that surrounded their rural home, building walls, forts and bridges in a childhood marked by an extraordinary unstructured freedom foreign to today's children. Busch's description of his childhood explorations and wanderings made me think of Cooper, and the child Ben Busch as a kind of half-size Natty Bumppo -
"The forest spread undisturbed and beyond measure, and I felt like I had found a place before maps. I drew my own map of the forest, without a compass, and gave names to the terrain. It was a kind of storytelling."
Busch continues describing this forest, this "place before maps," until he reaches a point he proclaimed "the center of the forest," and comments, "Reading ROBINSON CRUSOE here would be different from reading it in a room." There, of course, is that inescapable influence of his more cautious, book-ish parents.
Although both of Ben's grandfathers had served in WWII, his parents were shocked when Ben joined the Marines out of Vassar. He was, in fact, the very first Marine officer candidate to come from Vassar, which his boot camp commander called a "girls' school." Busch had the ill-advised temerity to correct the officer, saying, as his many female classmates had taught him, that it was a "women's college, sir." (In fact, Vassar has ben co-educational since 1969.)
There is no hint of braggadocio or macho chest-thumping to be found anywhere in Busch's accounts of his service in Iraq. He tells instead, in tellingly terse terms, of being ambushed, of rushing his wounded men to aid stations, of holding the hand of a too-young man, bleeding out and in shock, asking, "What is happening to me?" Busch doesn't have an answer. He goes outside into the dark and washes the man's blood from his hand. In another incident he tells of how he and a captain friend break the tension of a dangerous patrol by trading remembered absurd dialogue about being "in great peril" from MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL. Moments later the captain was dead from an IED explosion. Feeling powerless, in a letter home, Busch reviews the Rules of Engagement -
"Positive identification of a threat is required before you can fire. Reasonable certainty ... You are not sure, in the shimmering imagination of night vision equipment, if you see something moving. It can't be positively identified. You are holding your fire. You are holding your position ..."
He reflects on how the "purity of service had been corrupted by the moral ambiguity of political language." Like most servicemen deployed to Iraq, Busch suffered concussions from bomb blasts, a daily hazard a medical surgeon shrugs off as "typical." Besides telling of his own time in Iraq, Bush also touches on the agony of waiting suffered by his parents during his two tours there. His father, in a piece he wrote for HARPER'S, commented on how he and his wife, both in their mid-sixties, ticked off each successive day of his time there, adding, "Perhaps we feel that by slicing another day off our lives, as we wish it away to bring him home, we are spending our lives to buy his."
This is a serious memoir, no mistake. But there is humor here too, as in Busch's description of his first brush with acting at the age of seven, when he dies dramatically by falling noisily backward off a school stage, a feat which caused a collective gasp from cast and audience alike. Years later, out of the Corps, his first two acting jobs are, ironically, as a corpse on a morgue table, and a murder victim lying in a pool of blood on a freezing Baltimore street. His roles have gotten better since then.
As a child growing up in the Catholic Church, I can still remember the priest's words every Ash Wednesday when he smudged the ashes onto my forehead, "Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return." Benjamin Busch, in one of his returns to his childhood endeavors, tells of a stone fort he built as a boy and the pleasure he took in simply sitting inside it, saying he wanted to live in it. But he could "also imagine being buried in it. It was my work, this crypt built of stone, intended for perpetuity like any grave. All anyone would need to do would be to lay me inside and fill it in." These kinds of thoughts may seem foreign and dismal to some, but not Busch, who also says: "There is something to be said about being dust. It is where we're all headed."
DUST TO DUST is a work of art unto itself, a memoir unique, troubling and magical. I will not soon forget it.
- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER
Some readers may have trouble with the spiraling, circular narrative, which jumps from his solitary childhood enterprises and adventures to his war-time service as a Marine officer in Iraq, then back to that childhood in upstate New York and Maine. He tells too of his college years, interspersed with more tales of his military training in Virginia, North Carolina and California, his deployments to Ukraine and Korea, and trips as a child and young man to England. What emerges is a portrait of a boy and a man with a boundless curiosity about the world he inhabits and how he fits into it. His whole life Busch has struggled against rules and expectations, endlessly experimenting and daring to be different. The son of a novelist (Frederick Busch) father and librarian mother, Busch grew up with a healthy respect for books, but was drawn more to exploring the forests, fields and streams that surrounded their rural home, building walls, forts and bridges in a childhood marked by an extraordinary unstructured freedom foreign to today's children. Busch's description of his childhood explorations and wanderings made me think of Cooper, and the child Ben Busch as a kind of half-size Natty Bumppo -
"The forest spread undisturbed and beyond measure, and I felt like I had found a place before maps. I drew my own map of the forest, without a compass, and gave names to the terrain. It was a kind of storytelling."
Busch continues describing this forest, this "place before maps," until he reaches a point he proclaimed "the center of the forest," and comments, "Reading ROBINSON CRUSOE here would be different from reading it in a room." There, of course, is that inescapable influence of his more cautious, book-ish parents.
Although both of Ben's grandfathers had served in WWII, his parents were shocked when Ben joined the Marines out of Vassar. He was, in fact, the very first Marine officer candidate to come from Vassar, which his boot camp commander called a "girls' school." Busch had the ill-advised temerity to correct the officer, saying, as his many female classmates had taught him, that it was a "women's college, sir." (In fact, Vassar has ben co-educational since 1969.)
There is no hint of braggadocio or macho chest-thumping to be found anywhere in Busch's accounts of his service in Iraq. He tells instead, in tellingly terse terms, of being ambushed, of rushing his wounded men to aid stations, of holding the hand of a too-young man, bleeding out and in shock, asking, "What is happening to me?" Busch doesn't have an answer. He goes outside into the dark and washes the man's blood from his hand. In another incident he tells of how he and a captain friend break the tension of a dangerous patrol by trading remembered absurd dialogue about being "in great peril" from MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL. Moments later the captain was dead from an IED explosion. Feeling powerless, in a letter home, Busch reviews the Rules of Engagement -
"Positive identification of a threat is required before you can fire. Reasonable certainty ... You are not sure, in the shimmering imagination of night vision equipment, if you see something moving. It can't be positively identified. You are holding your fire. You are holding your position ..."
He reflects on how the "purity of service had been corrupted by the moral ambiguity of political language." Like most servicemen deployed to Iraq, Busch suffered concussions from bomb blasts, a daily hazard a medical surgeon shrugs off as "typical." Besides telling of his own time in Iraq, Bush also touches on the agony of waiting suffered by his parents during his two tours there. His father, in a piece he wrote for HARPER'S, commented on how he and his wife, both in their mid-sixties, ticked off each successive day of his time there, adding, "Perhaps we feel that by slicing another day off our lives, as we wish it away to bring him home, we are spending our lives to buy his."
This is a serious memoir, no mistake. But there is humor here too, as in Busch's description of his first brush with acting at the age of seven, when he dies dramatically by falling noisily backward off a school stage, a feat which caused a collective gasp from cast and audience alike. Years later, out of the Corps, his first two acting jobs are, ironically, as a corpse on a morgue table, and a murder victim lying in a pool of blood on a freezing Baltimore street. His roles have gotten better since then.
As a child growing up in the Catholic Church, I can still remember the priest's words every Ash Wednesday when he smudged the ashes onto my forehead, "Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return." Benjamin Busch, in one of his returns to his childhood endeavors, tells of a stone fort he built as a boy and the pleasure he took in simply sitting inside it, saying he wanted to live in it. But he could "also imagine being buried in it. It was my work, this crypt built of stone, intended for perpetuity like any grave. All anyone would need to do would be to lay me inside and fill it in." These kinds of thoughts may seem foreign and dismal to some, but not Busch, who also says: "There is something to be said about being dust. It is where we're all headed."
DUST TO DUST is a work of art unto itself, a memoir unique, troubling and magical. I will not soon forget it.
- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER
March 18, 2012
"I knew very early that I was a solitary being. I longed for the elemental". That is how the prologue to this book begins. Two pages into this memoir, I was entranced. Busch has a style of writing that thrills me in a way that I cannot explain--baldly honest, clear eyed and bursting with the visual and tactile as well as profound emotion with a deep seated philosophy a constant undercurrent to the prose. He tells his story through the elements that have made the most impressions on him throughout his life, with chapters named "Water", "Soil", Wood", "Stone". He also reveals his life long affinity toward soldiering in "Arms", "Metal", "Blood". Yet, just like in life, all of the elements come into play, often mixing together during important times, providing a
continuous center that not everyone can identify in themselves. Written as a way through his grief at the loss of his parents--both in less than a year--this book offers up a way for all of us to examine our lives and their components, to see how they built us, where they have taken us or will take us, and what it all means. This is an astonishing book, and I cannot find enough ways to recommend it. I'll settle with, "Please, read this book."
continuous center that not everyone can identify in themselves. Written as a way through his grief at the loss of his parents--both in less than a year--this book offers up a way for all of us to examine our lives and their components, to see how they built us, where they have taken us or will take us, and what it all means. This is an astonishing book, and I cannot find enough ways to recommend it. I'll settle with, "Please, read this book."
July 21, 2012
A skillfully-written memoir by a Marine combat veteran who describes himself as a "solitary being." The author has organized his memoirs around themes reflecting substances in the natural environment such as soil, stone, arms, blood, and ash. An underlying theme of this book, in accordance with its Biblical title, is that men and all the objects they create eventually age, die, scatter, turn to fragments, and are forgotten. This underlying theme recurs in sharp contract to the author's ostensible purpose as a memoir, and in contrast to the author's father, a novelist, who sometimes wrote fictionalized versions of his son's activities in his novels and who wished to be remembered after his death. Mr. Busch's parents forbade him to have a gun, but Mr. Busch was repeatedly drawn to guns, warfare, and death; while a college student he volunteered for the Marine Corps and served three tours of duty as an office in Iraq, a choice that greatly distressed his parents.
The fragmented and transitory nature of memory is reflected in his memories of events in his life such as moving, building, collecting, travel, and warfare. This memoir is curiously detached -- objects in the natural environment rather than people take center stage, and the only people who figure very prominently are his parents. Objects and features in the natural environment, such as trees and great rivers, are described memorably. The author has a brother, wife, children, and friends, but they seem almost peripheral to his narrative.
The detached manner of the narrator made the book drag somewhat for me, although it may not bother other readers. This is the reason I gave it three stars; although it is artfully written, it seemed gloomy and disturbing. Although his premise is correct, one perhaps need not dwell constantly upon death,war, and cemeteries during the few brief years one is granted to live on earth.
The one image in the book that stood out was the accidental death of a duck that he unwisely captured from the wild for his daughter as a pet.
The fragmented and transitory nature of memory is reflected in his memories of events in his life such as moving, building, collecting, travel, and warfare. This memoir is curiously detached -- objects in the natural environment rather than people take center stage, and the only people who figure very prominently are his parents. Objects and features in the natural environment, such as trees and great rivers, are described memorably. The author has a brother, wife, children, and friends, but they seem almost peripheral to his narrative.
The detached manner of the narrator made the book drag somewhat for me, although it may not bother other readers. This is the reason I gave it three stars; although it is artfully written, it seemed gloomy and disturbing. Although his premise is correct, one perhaps need not dwell constantly upon death,war, and cemeteries during the few brief years one is granted to live on earth.
The one image in the book that stood out was the accidental death of a duck that he unwisely captured from the wild for his daughter as a pet.
February 28, 2013
I spent the better part of 3 years reading nonfiction books about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in order to research for my own book (which is fictional) about war. But I also teach and love memoir, so I make a point to keep up with highly praised work by new American authors. Benjamin Busch's memoir Dust to Dust was one of the best reads for me last year, on so many levels. As a war writer, it opened up the quieter aspects of war that I had not yet pondered. As memoir instructor, it helped me see that stories with high drama can still be told quietly, humorously, and honestly. It informed me about one man's experience leading up to and surviving war. But it also told a story of that man before war...as a child who wondered and wandered, who dreamed and attempted impossible, delightful physical tasks. I loved the way Busch was able to capture the sense of play and timelessness that all young children must feel when they are free to play in the forest or the outdoors at a young age. And these recollections made his chapters about war and Iraq that much more poignant, as I felt I could see the whole person--a fully rounded character, flaws and hope and all--under duress in extraordinary situations.
May 20, 2012
'Attrition is the mission.'
There are memoirs and there a Memoirs - usually those relating life experiences come toward the end of life, providing a sage exploration of what has made existence of the reporter on the planet unique, just before finally closing the eyes in a terminal sleep. Some are written as confessions or as leaving clues for the obituary writer whose concern it is to sum up a life soon completely spent.
Benjamin Busch in DUST TO DUST writes more about life as it is currently molding his psyche, admixing moments of childhood memories with adult confrontations with such ominous beasts as wars and the threat of annihilation, yet in the end his book settles into the rank of great literature - a book so thoughtfully unique, so eloquently written, that instead of a Memoir (and one deserving the capital M) Benjamin Busch has written an extended poem that embraces all the interstices of life as it is being remembered and experienced in as completely involved a fashion as a learned sage of much older years.
One of the many facets of this book is Busch's decision to divide his book into chapters that are based on the themes of elements - Arms, Water, Metal, Soil, Bone, Wood, Stones, Blood, Ash - a wise technique of traveling from childhood to adulthood in each chapter, ingeniously focusing each level of memory regression based on an aspect of his young years that became part of his direction toward revealing reality as it feels at the present. Childhood preoccupation with fighting and creating battleships and airplanes and the other accoutrements of a young (very bright) boy's mind slowly emerge toward his life as a soldier. But just as toy airplanes made of alley trash and foil never get off the ground despite the longing for consummation of adventurous dreams, so does the commitment to become a Marine Corps officer fail to rise to expectations of glorious battle and instead results in delays and aborted odd missions until the action in Iraq et al when primed conceit is rotted with shrapnel wounds and observation of loss of life - all in meaningless exercises in loss and disillusion.
Another surprise that accompanies the reader on every page of this book is the manner in which Benjamin Busch has so quickly become a painter - representational and expressionist and impressionist and photographic and collage - with his recreating his childhood and the subsequent move toward adulthood. His depictions of long ago created forts, of his interaction with the vagaries of nature's water bodies and other remembered childhood interactions with the elements are as pulsatile and poetic as are his depictions of Okinawa, Iraq, boot camp, and the response to the death of his parents. And Busch uses this gift of pictorial creation to define a life that is molded by a significant past and constantly altered by the coincidences of the present. Yes there are portions about the author's response to war as he lives it: `I walked though the battlefield as if I were a tourist. I looked at Iran in the near distance. It had battled Iraq with artillery shells that we had sent them in the support of the shah, and Iraq had fired back with shells that we had later given in support of Saddam. We were now hunting that same man, Rumsfeld's old ally, who was, at the moment, hiding in a hole in the dirt, writing orders to his lieutenants requiring their resistance to terrorists we blamed him for befriending, He was hiding in a hole in the yard of a house that had no cellar.' Ludicrous reality reported by a wise Marine who was there. This blend of irony and humor pervades the book, allowing breezes of fresh air to the author's analysis of the passage of time as he has lived in it. `I found it odd that celebration and mourning were coupled in so many single, detached acts. All bullets landed somewhere.'
In Benjamin Busch's Epilogue he reflects, `I have seen cities destroyed in my life, people buried, graves dug up. I have lived outside in the elements. I know that everything is recomposed from preexisting matter, that we are all fragments from earth and life blown apart and gathered up. Pieces of us are form stars and meteors, the ocean, dirt, and the dead. We will not be able to keep these pieces wither, our bodies doomed to be given back to the ground.' Writing of this quality comes only from great minds - perhaps part of the gift is genetically passed from Busch's father, writer Frederick Busch whose precise, poetic novels and stories delved into the seemingly unspectacular but ultimately profound experiences of people and families grappling with existential crises. What every the ingredients that comprise Busch's gift he is surely one of the more important writers to emerge in a long time: he will not fall into the military phrase that titles this review. He must be read to experience and appreciate his worth.
Grady Harp
There are memoirs and there a Memoirs - usually those relating life experiences come toward the end of life, providing a sage exploration of what has made existence of the reporter on the planet unique, just before finally closing the eyes in a terminal sleep. Some are written as confessions or as leaving clues for the obituary writer whose concern it is to sum up a life soon completely spent.
Benjamin Busch in DUST TO DUST writes more about life as it is currently molding his psyche, admixing moments of childhood memories with adult confrontations with such ominous beasts as wars and the threat of annihilation, yet in the end his book settles into the rank of great literature - a book so thoughtfully unique, so eloquently written, that instead of a Memoir (and one deserving the capital M) Benjamin Busch has written an extended poem that embraces all the interstices of life as it is being remembered and experienced in as completely involved a fashion as a learned sage of much older years.
One of the many facets of this book is Busch's decision to divide his book into chapters that are based on the themes of elements - Arms, Water, Metal, Soil, Bone, Wood, Stones, Blood, Ash - a wise technique of traveling from childhood to adulthood in each chapter, ingeniously focusing each level of memory regression based on an aspect of his young years that became part of his direction toward revealing reality as it feels at the present. Childhood preoccupation with fighting and creating battleships and airplanes and the other accoutrements of a young (very bright) boy's mind slowly emerge toward his life as a soldier. But just as toy airplanes made of alley trash and foil never get off the ground despite the longing for consummation of adventurous dreams, so does the commitment to become a Marine Corps officer fail to rise to expectations of glorious battle and instead results in delays and aborted odd missions until the action in Iraq et al when primed conceit is rotted with shrapnel wounds and observation of loss of life - all in meaningless exercises in loss and disillusion.
Another surprise that accompanies the reader on every page of this book is the manner in which Benjamin Busch has so quickly become a painter - representational and expressionist and impressionist and photographic and collage - with his recreating his childhood and the subsequent move toward adulthood. His depictions of long ago created forts, of his interaction with the vagaries of nature's water bodies and other remembered childhood interactions with the elements are as pulsatile and poetic as are his depictions of Okinawa, Iraq, boot camp, and the response to the death of his parents. And Busch uses this gift of pictorial creation to define a life that is molded by a significant past and constantly altered by the coincidences of the present. Yes there are portions about the author's response to war as he lives it: `I walked though the battlefield as if I were a tourist. I looked at Iran in the near distance. It had battled Iraq with artillery shells that we had sent them in the support of the shah, and Iraq had fired back with shells that we had later given in support of Saddam. We were now hunting that same man, Rumsfeld's old ally, who was, at the moment, hiding in a hole in the dirt, writing orders to his lieutenants requiring their resistance to terrorists we blamed him for befriending, He was hiding in a hole in the yard of a house that had no cellar.' Ludicrous reality reported by a wise Marine who was there. This blend of irony and humor pervades the book, allowing breezes of fresh air to the author's analysis of the passage of time as he has lived in it. `I found it odd that celebration and mourning were coupled in so many single, detached acts. All bullets landed somewhere.'
In Benjamin Busch's Epilogue he reflects, `I have seen cities destroyed in my life, people buried, graves dug up. I have lived outside in the elements. I know that everything is recomposed from preexisting matter, that we are all fragments from earth and life blown apart and gathered up. Pieces of us are form stars and meteors, the ocean, dirt, and the dead. We will not be able to keep these pieces wither, our bodies doomed to be given back to the ground.' Writing of this quality comes only from great minds - perhaps part of the gift is genetically passed from Busch's father, writer Frederick Busch whose precise, poetic novels and stories delved into the seemingly unspectacular but ultimately profound experiences of people and families grappling with existential crises. What every the ingredients that comprise Busch's gift he is surely one of the more important writers to emerge in a long time: he will not fall into the military phrase that titles this review. He must be read to experience and appreciate his worth.
Grady Harp
July 29, 2012
This memoir is not chronological or linear but flows through the author's life in a series of elemental chapters - water, wood, bone, blood, ash. Each chapter circles through his life with reminiscences of youth, soldier, family, love and loss, traveling with ease from the rivers of his rural childhood to rivers of Iraq, from the ash of a fire during Marine training to the ashes of his parents. A beautifully written work from this author, actor, Marine, artist, son and parent.
November 6, 2024
Before I get into this review, I want to say I'm not a fan of memoirs. That is mostly why I gave this two stars. I got bored sometimes and honestly I was depressed through the novel. If anyone who was into memoirs and want to know about military life, this is the book for you. The book had amazing symbolism and themes. It was depressing and everything the author wrote had a reason why each scene was important. But this book ripped my heart and stomped on it. The author addressed the results of warfare and why someone would want to be in the army. After this book, I'm gonna be pretty sad for a while until I read another Master's book.
September 7, 2024
I fluctuated between 4 stars and 2 stars as I read this. This is a very Tim O’Brien type book. It felt the author was trying to be profound in every single sentence. Sometimes he nailed it, but most times it just became too foo-foo for me.
October 21, 2024
A rather unconventional and literary memoir of a Marine. Boyhood memories provide the foundation for adult adventures. Just some profound introspection on living and dying from a warrior poet.
January 17, 2016
This is a worthy first effort. Although I remember seeing this book described as a war memoir, recollections of the Iraq War comprise a relatively minor part of the narrative. However, there is plenty to interest anyone who likes quality prose and serious reflection. Busch has a ruminative, soothing writing voice, and he knows how to pay attention to the details, too well, even. His scenes from a very active childhood are impressively rendered, but they do get repetitive by the last third of the book. He has an artist's ability to notice beauty and meaning, just not yet the maturity as a writer to restrain himself. In consequence, despite the long, lovely meditations on life, death, and time, too many scenes do not seem to go anywhere, or fail to reach a deeper level of insight than that attained in a previous chapter or paragraph. I am not likely to ever read Dust to Dust again, but I am not sorry I took the time to work through it, and I would be interested in picking up any future efforts from its author.
August 15, 2012
Whoever writes back cover blurbs should be held to a higher accountability. Promising a cross between Tim O'Brien and Annie Dillard is, admittedly, a tall order. But if you're going to plop down those names, you'd better deliver.
Unfortunately, Mr. Busch didn't.
Clearly he's a thinking, observational man-- but those observations couldn't quite find their way from the stilted prose and off the page into my soul.
I always feel a little bad panning a book (knowing the work which goes into it), but I'm sorry-- I couldn't help but wonder if the only reason this made it into print was because he's the son of Frederick Busch, and because he's an actor on some HBO series.
(one caveat: I do have to give him his due respect as a decorated Marine and veteran.)
His experiences just didn't translate to this reader.
Unfortunately, Mr. Busch didn't.
Clearly he's a thinking, observational man-- but those observations couldn't quite find their way from the stilted prose and off the page into my soul.
I always feel a little bad panning a book (knowing the work which goes into it), but I'm sorry-- I couldn't help but wonder if the only reason this made it into print was because he's the son of Frederick Busch, and because he's an actor on some HBO series.
(one caveat: I do have to give him his due respect as a decorated Marine and veteran.)
His experiences just didn't translate to this reader.
April 18, 2012
This memoir is one of the most beuatifully-written books I've read in a long time. It must be in the genes, since the author's late father was also an accomplished scribe. Busch is first and foremost an observer and his ruminations on ordinary things is extraordinary. Have I used up all the superlatives yet? Read it, and you'll come up with more.
January 21, 2013
Son of a novelist, well know actor, Iraq combat vet. Spare, beautiful prose I savored. Every page had me transfixed. Wonderful memoir.
February 29, 2020
Came across this for sale at a small rural library. Picked it up for a dollar on a whim, and very glad I did.
Benjamin Busch manages to weave together a powerful memoir of childhood and war and family. At times it felt a little bit disconnected. The book is arranged along elemental themes: Wood, Metal, Ash, Water, etc. In each chapter a number of stories from different seasons of life are woven together as reflections on each theme. For such an unconventional structure, it worked remarkably well. The writing is really very good, unlike this description of it.
I had one lingering question as I closed the book. Having dealt with family, nature, war, death, and all those massive themes of human life, there was never any substantive consideration of spiritual reality; no posing of ultimate questions and no attempt to answer such question. That struck me as peculiar.
Benjamin Busch manages to weave together a powerful memoir of childhood and war and family. At times it felt a little bit disconnected. The book is arranged along elemental themes: Wood, Metal, Ash, Water, etc. In each chapter a number of stories from different seasons of life are woven together as reflections on each theme. For such an unconventional structure, it worked remarkably well. The writing is really very good, unlike this description of it.
I had one lingering question as I closed the book. Having dealt with family, nature, war, death, and all those massive themes of human life, there was never any substantive consideration of spiritual reality; no posing of ultimate questions and no attempt to answer such question. That struck me as peculiar.
April 7, 2012
I found this book to be profoundly moving and a remarkably unique memoir, quite different from anything else in the genre I’ve read before. It is not one chronological or linear narrative, spanning Busch’s life thus far in a straightforward arc. Instead, being the “elemental” person that he introduces himself as in the prologue, Busch fashions each chapter around a different element: wood, bone, stone, blood, metal, water, dust, and more. Each chapter then takes the shape of an ellipse of sorts—starting usually with some piece of his childhood, then moving forward and through various scenes: a battle-ravaged village in Iraq, then to a street in Baltimore while shooting a scene as an actor, then to his farmland in Michigan, and then curling back around to a bookending scene in the forest of his boyhood.
While this structure may take some getting used to, it doesn’t come off as muddled or confusing. It defies the reader’s attempt to fit each piece of Busch’s life together in a seamless plot, instead allowing one to breathe along with the pulses of the story. The book is very deliberately paced, meant to work as a meditation on childhood, on family, on loss, but mostly especially—on memory. As such, it seemed appropriate to me that it flows in such an unusual way, circling back and then leaping forward, clinging to the same scenes and emotions, in much the way our own memory works. The language itself is stunning, a fluid and lyrical prose, verging on poetic in places, and it’s almost unfathomable how this is Busch’s first published book. I think pretty much anyone who picks this book up will be glad they did, as long as they give themselves the time to fully immerse themselves in it, to be cast back to their childhood. To remember.
While this structure may take some getting used to, it doesn’t come off as muddled or confusing. It defies the reader’s attempt to fit each piece of Busch’s life together in a seamless plot, instead allowing one to breathe along with the pulses of the story. The book is very deliberately paced, meant to work as a meditation on childhood, on family, on loss, but mostly especially—on memory. As such, it seemed appropriate to me that it flows in such an unusual way, circling back and then leaping forward, clinging to the same scenes and emotions, in much the way our own memory works. The language itself is stunning, a fluid and lyrical prose, verging on poetic in places, and it’s almost unfathomable how this is Busch’s first published book. I think pretty much anyone who picks this book up will be glad they did, as long as they give themselves the time to fully immerse themselves in it, to be cast back to their childhood. To remember.
February 20, 2014
Picked up this book because the author was coming to my local library for a reading. However, due to a schedule conflict, I wasn’t ultimately able to attend the reading. I was excited that this was a local Michigan author, plus a Marine and actor to boot!
While there was nothing exactly wrong with the book, there also wasn’t anything that grabbed me or inspired me. I had trouble connecting with the author. Perhaps it was because his writing was poetically vague in parts. Perhaps it was because I wasn’t a man that shared his love of the outdoors. I love the idea of an adventurous boy who grows up to be a soldier, as well as a well rounded poet/actor. But I just couldn’t connect with this book.
The author mentions his very liberal upbringing and the book felt a bit like an apologetic explanation of his military service geared toward a liberal reader. That turned me off a bit. The book also romanticized his adventures and lacked the rugged realism of most military books. It felt like a collection of well-honed cocktail stories about his past. I could imagine him telling these stories at Hollywood parties to build up his reputation as a rugged military man - always being mindful of his surroundings and framing the stories for the liberal, drama-loving hollywood types.
I was about halfway through the book when I missed the reading. I tried to finish the book but started skimming and eventually just abandoned it.
While there was nothing exactly wrong with the book, there also wasn’t anything that grabbed me or inspired me. I had trouble connecting with the author. Perhaps it was because his writing was poetically vague in parts. Perhaps it was because I wasn’t a man that shared his love of the outdoors. I love the idea of an adventurous boy who grows up to be a soldier, as well as a well rounded poet/actor. But I just couldn’t connect with this book.
The author mentions his very liberal upbringing and the book felt a bit like an apologetic explanation of his military service geared toward a liberal reader. That turned me off a bit. The book also romanticized his adventures and lacked the rugged realism of most military books. It felt like a collection of well-honed cocktail stories about his past. I could imagine him telling these stories at Hollywood parties to build up his reputation as a rugged military man - always being mindful of his surroundings and framing the stories for the liberal, drama-loving hollywood types.
I was about halfway through the book when I missed the reading. I tried to finish the book but started skimming and eventually just abandoned it.
March 2, 2013
The Ben Busch described on the Dust-to-Dust book jacket is a Marine who served two combat tours in Iraq. The Ben Busch described in the pages between the covers is a poet.
“The dust and sand moved relentlessly across the desert like a film of rough liquid being dragged by invisible rakes. Pointless and purposeful.”
His poetry is what settles into memory after the fighting stops.
“I was listening to dust. We were waiting to invade a land composed of it. The static coming over the radios sometimes sounded like the wind blowing through large trees, but in my comm helmet there were no natural lulls, no pauses that winds give themselves under the churning of clouds in the fall. The static was caused, in part, by dust particles in the connectors. The dust was, in its own way, communicating.”
So too is this soldier poet. He’s trying to connect humanity, the fragility of life, through recollections from his time in Iraq and home, on leave. He’s suddenly a tourist in his own country, describing a seven hundred year old skeleton of a girl found in Virginia’s Luray cave.
“No one thinks that she ended there on purpose, to die in lightless solitude under dripping water, safe from wind and men, her body slowly accepted as part of the washed underworld.”
If there is anything to learn from the war that drifts and washes through this memoir, it is the poetry of life.
“The dust and sand moved relentlessly across the desert like a film of rough liquid being dragged by invisible rakes. Pointless and purposeful.”
His poetry is what settles into memory after the fighting stops.
“I was listening to dust. We were waiting to invade a land composed of it. The static coming over the radios sometimes sounded like the wind blowing through large trees, but in my comm helmet there were no natural lulls, no pauses that winds give themselves under the churning of clouds in the fall. The static was caused, in part, by dust particles in the connectors. The dust was, in its own way, communicating.”
So too is this soldier poet. He’s trying to connect humanity, the fragility of life, through recollections from his time in Iraq and home, on leave. He’s suddenly a tourist in his own country, describing a seven hundred year old skeleton of a girl found in Virginia’s Luray cave.
“No one thinks that she ended there on purpose, to die in lightless solitude under dripping water, safe from wind and men, her body slowly accepted as part of the washed underworld.”
If there is anything to learn from the war that drifts and washes through this memoir, it is the poetry of life.
December 22, 2014
The author went to Vassar, majored in art, and became a Marine officer with two tours in Iraq – not someone who stereotypes easily. The book is called a memoir and is divided into 9 chapters - I would call them essays – with titles like Arms, Water, or Bone. When I began the book, it seemed you could read the essays as individual pieces; by the end I saw them as having beautiful cohesion and wholeness.
This is not a typical chronological memoir. Each chapter begins with a section describing his childhood in rural New York State. These were some of my favorite sections. Each chapter also has a section about his adult experiences – often in the military. I was captivated by the unusual style for a memoir. Busch does not tell us what he was feeling and his story is presented in a near neutral voice; still I could see his experiences and developed a deep sense of who he was.
I think one reason I liked this book so much was that it reminded me of Roy. I was aware that I wanted to read sections aloud to Roy and that he would have related to Busch’s childhood experiences of building forts and working in the water and the woods. The book surprised me with the excellent writing and the unexpected depth.
This is not a typical chronological memoir. Each chapter begins with a section describing his childhood in rural New York State. These were some of my favorite sections. Each chapter also has a section about his adult experiences – often in the military. I was captivated by the unusual style for a memoir. Busch does not tell us what he was feeling and his story is presented in a near neutral voice; still I could see his experiences and developed a deep sense of who he was.
I think one reason I liked this book so much was that it reminded me of Roy. I was aware that I wanted to read sections aloud to Roy and that he would have related to Busch’s childhood experiences of building forts and working in the water and the woods. The book surprised me with the excellent writing and the unexpected depth.
July 26, 2012
I'm not sure if this is a five-star book, or if I read it at the right moment in my life, but the format, the content and the prose continue to resonate with me.
This memoir is written by a former U.S. Marine Corps officer (who later became an actor, filmmaker and writer) who divides the book into sections such as "Arms," "Wood," "Metal," "Water," and the like, filling the chapters with memories from childhood, from tours of duty, from the current day. There's a bit of a remove: though in many cases, he shares beautiful and brutal reminiscences, I came away realizing that there was a lot I didn't know about the author. But I was so satisfied by his musings, as rambling as they were at times, that I don't feel a need to quibble about that.
I don't know what I expected when I took this out of the library, but I'm still thinking about the lovely imagery and often evocative writing, and also, reflecting upon my own life through a similar lens.
The author quotes Hemingway at one point: "All you have to do is write one true sentence." For me, he accomplished that many times over.
This memoir is written by a former U.S. Marine Corps officer (who later became an actor, filmmaker and writer) who divides the book into sections such as "Arms," "Wood," "Metal," "Water," and the like, filling the chapters with memories from childhood, from tours of duty, from the current day. There's a bit of a remove: though in many cases, he shares beautiful and brutal reminiscences, I came away realizing that there was a lot I didn't know about the author. But I was so satisfied by his musings, as rambling as they were at times, that I don't feel a need to quibble about that.
I don't know what I expected when I took this out of the library, but I'm still thinking about the lovely imagery and often evocative writing, and also, reflecting upon my own life through a similar lens.
The author quotes Hemingway at one point: "All you have to do is write one true sentence." For me, he accomplished that many times over.
June 3, 2012
I really, really wanted to like this book. A memoir by a Vassar fine arts graduate who becomes a Marine officer, serves in Iraq and then becomes an actor on The Wire? Sounds like a fascinating story, right?
Well, actually, no. It was disappointing. It consisted mostly of wordy descriptions of things in nature, like stones and trees, which did not hold my attention..
The book left unanswered some basic questions like why he even joined the Marines. I didn't learn much about Mr. Busch but I guess I could've learned a lot about stones and trees if I had been more diligent.
I also just finished "Plainsong". In a sentence or two, Kent Haruf evokes the feel of being on a cattle ranch or on a road in the Rocky Mountains. This is good writing. Mr. Busch is not nearly as evocative in several paragraphs of description about a locale. I can only hope that he will discover "Plainsong" and learn from it.
Well, actually, no. It was disappointing. It consisted mostly of wordy descriptions of things in nature, like stones and trees, which did not hold my attention..
The book left unanswered some basic questions like why he even joined the Marines. I didn't learn much about Mr. Busch but I guess I could've learned a lot about stones and trees if I had been more diligent.
I also just finished "Plainsong". In a sentence or two, Kent Haruf evokes the feel of being on a cattle ranch or on a road in the Rocky Mountains. This is good writing. Mr. Busch is not nearly as evocative in several paragraphs of description about a locale. I can only hope that he will discover "Plainsong" and learn from it.
June 30, 2012
This is the first memoir I ever read that I could relate to. A "solitary being" drawn to the elemental; what you can touch, feel, manipulate, construct, breath, and battle. Dust. Those looking for a memoir of human interaction and gab, where the physical is some soulless prop, should look elsewhere. This book finds substance in the "elements"; our interaction with them and contemplation of them which can shine a light on life and its impermanance. This will appeal to the engineer, craftsman, geologists, scientists, rock collectors, tinkerers, and gardeners among us; i.e., the invisible people in most literature seen as unfeeling and silent. If you can't understand how emotion and meaning can be drawn from our relationship to the physical world, you are missing something profound. Dust to dust; the beginning and end of life, but dust is also the stuff of eternity and worth our awareness.
July 15, 2012
Best book of 2012 (at least so far). Busch is the son of novelist Frederick Busch ("The Night Inspector")and an actor who appeared on "The Wire". He has produced a memoir/meditation that meanders and sometimes circles like a stream from his boyhood wandering the woods of upstate New York, to his studies at Vassar, and his two tours as a Marine officer in Iraq. As the son of a novelist/academic father and a librarian mother, Busch seemed to find shelter from their bookishness in the forests and fields of his boyhood home. Using chapters concerning natural forms such as "Dust", "Wood, "Stone", "Water", etc., Busch gets in touch with the essences of our world and reduces his memory to its primary elements. I can't recomment this book enough.
February 27, 2013
Benjamin Busch's poetic memoir is wonderful. After hearing him read excerpts in Grand Rapids two weeks ago, I bought Dust to Dust and re-discovered my own childhood through Busch's heartfelt description of his youth and the connections to his adult life.
April 21, 2012
I read this book...twice. This is a first for me. Buy it. I promise you won't be disappointed. A literary gem.
July 16, 2012
"Dust to Dust" is a wonderful read. A moving mediation on life, death and the experiences of a combat marine/actor/author/photographer. I enjoyed every page and recommend it to all of my friends.
January 12, 2013
Want to know about war and its aftereffects? Read this. Hauntng. Hats off to Busch for writing it.
February 27, 2013
Dust to Dust is the most gripping novel I have read since Hemmingway's Old Man and the Sea. Wonderful ! A very Human Document.
March 16, 2013
Moving. Beautiful writing. I loved this book.
April 24, 2013
Amazing. Haunting. Beautiful.
June 29, 2013
One of the most necessary books I've read in a very long time.
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