Once Two Heroes

by Calvin Baker

Once Two Heroes is the story, heart-quickening and tragic, of two Americans called to fight in the Second World Mather, a young black man who has grown up in France, and Lewis, the son of a genteel, old, white Mississippi family. Both go to battle full of the best ideas of the world, and prove themselves to be soldiers to be reckoned with. But back home Mather and Lewis learn, each in his own way, that what happened in war was no preparation for the brutal violence of peace. Haunted by the hopes, dreams, and dangerous illusions of America after the war, Once Two Heroes explores the best and worst of what men do, and the grand forces of the past that prefigure the present.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction

397 pages, Hardcover

First published January 27, 2003

About the author

Calvin Baker is the author of the critically-acclaimed novels Naming the New World, Once Two Heroes and Dominion, which was a finalist for the Hurston-Wright Award, a New York Magazine Critics’ Pick and New York Daily News Best Book of the Year. His long-awaited fourth novel, Grace, will be published in July.

Calvin Baker grew up in Chicago and currently lives in New York.

Reviews

[Heather · Rating 1 out of 5]

The premise was interesting but that's where my engagement with this book stopped. I raced to the end and was just disappointed. I found it difficult to find rhythm with the prose and it seemed to me that the author just got lost in thought a lot, which led to confusion and a lot of rereading sentences. This about the differences of two men. Long story short, character study with not enough lesson.

[Deborah Frazier Gibson]

Calvin Baker is an amazing author who should've been paid attention to long before now. His brutal honesty about how people regarded one another in terms of racism in the 1940's was physically shocking for me. But sadly enough, true. I hope to read more from this young man.

[Megan · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was really choppy.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a compelling story, and the ending is fucking horrifying, but the writer keeps getting poetic, maybe to show us all he went to college. It kept taking me out of the story.