Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails: A Memoir
    Unavailable
    Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails: A Memoir
    Unavailable
    Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails: A Memoir
    Audiobook8 hours

    Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails: A Memoir

    Published by Hachette Audio

    2.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    The publication of Jarhead launched a new career for Anthony Swofford, earning him accolades for its gritty and unexpected portraits of the soldiers who fought in the Gulf War. It spawned a Hollywood movie. It made Swofford famous and wealthy. It also nearly killed him.

    Now with the same unremitting intensity he brought to his first memoir, Swofford describes his search for identity, meaning, and a reconciliation with his dying father in the years after he returned from serving as a sniper in the Marines. Adjusting to life after war, he watched his older brother succumb to cancer and his first marriage disintegrate, leading him to pursue a lifestyle in Manhattan that brought him to the brink of collapse. Consumed by drugs, drinking, expensive cars, and women, Swofford lost almost everything and everyone that mattered to him.

    When a son is in trouble he hopes to turn to his greatest source of wisdom and support: his father. But Swofford and his father didn't exactly have that kind of relationship. The key, he realized, was to confront the man-a philandering, once hard-drinking, now terminally ill Vietnam vet he had struggled hard to understand and even harder to love. The two stubborn, strong-willed war vets embarked on a series of RV trips that quickly became a kind of reckoning in which Swofford took his father to task for a lifetime of infidelities and abuse. For many years Swofford had considered combat the decisive test of a man's greatness. With the understanding that came from these trips and the fateful encounter that took him to a like-minded woman named Christa, Swofford began to understand that becoming a father himself might be the ultimate measure of his life.

    Elegantly weaving his family's past with his own present-nights of excess and sexual conquest, visits with injured war veterans, and a near-fatal car crash-Swofford casts a courageous, insistent eye on both his father and himself in order to make sense of what his military service meant, and to decide, after nearly ending it, what his life can and should become as a man, a veteran, and a father.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHachette Audio
    Release dateJun 5, 2012
    ISBN9781611134551
    Unavailable
    Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails: A Memoir

    Related to Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails

    Related audiobooks

    Personal Memoirs For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Perishable Moments

      Nov 22, 2017

      I'm writing this after rewatching a beautifully crafted movie called "A River Runs Through It." It's about trout fishing, which is like saying "Gone With the Wind" is about the Civil War that divided this indivisible Union for four long, terrible yea

      3 min read

    • Article

      Book CLUB

      Nov 16, 2021

      Book CLUB
      1 min read

    • Article

      ...thomas And Jean Weir

      Aug 12, 2023

      ...thomas And Jean Weir
      2 min read

    • Article

      Editorial: A Memorial Day Request: Hoist A Glass For Red Today

      May 25, 2018

      The primary purpose of Memorial Day is to honor those who have sacrificed their lives to defend this country. There have, though, been many millions of others who gave portions of their lives to warfare but survived. This day is theirs too. Most, lik

      3 min read

    • Article

      Asylum Seeker To Fashion Maven

      Oct 13, 2022

      A Visible Man Edward Enninful/Bloomsbury The memoir from Edward Enninful OBE, the ground-breaking, new-generation editor-in-chief of British Vogue is open-hearted and arrestingly detailed. Written to inspire others to dream big, work hard and draw st

      2 min read

    • Article

      Testament Of Love

      Oct 19, 2022

      Testament Of Love
      4 min read

    • Article

      Onward, Christian’s Soldiers

      Apr 2, 2019

      The ghosts of the past haunt us in incalculable ways as we struggle toward a future that remains dim. Auburn-based author Christian Kiefer’s new novel, Phantoms, deals with the twin legacies of Japanese internment during World War II and unfinished b

      3 min read

    • Article

      Comedy In A Time Of Tragedy

      Jun 12, 2020

      Comedy In A Time Of Tragedy
      9 min read

    • Article

      Memories Of Comfort Food And War

      Nov 17, 2023

      My Big Fat Greek Taverna by Costa Ayiotis (Melinda Ferguson Books, R320) Long before MasterChef and Come Dine With Me, Ayiotis was one of those quintessential entrants who longs to throw in a good job and run a restaurant. Trained as a lawyer and hav

      2 min read

    • Article

      Dawn Neesom Mind Of My Own

      Apr 13, 2021

      The longer, warmer days and easing of lockdown means every woman will soon be confronted by a grinning man with a limp sausage in his hand. It’s barbecue season, when men decide to prove their alpha-male status by cremating stuff that was once food.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Interview Hope In The Ranks

      Apr 5, 2022

      Interview Hope In The Ranks
      4 min read

    • Article

      Mail

      Oct 2, 2018

      My wife, Nancy, is an amazing person, and I have her to thank for buying me my first subscription to Anglers Journal. I was hooked with the first issue. I cannot come up with words to appropriately convey the depth of my enjoyment of fishing, the cha

      3 min read

    • Article

      An Occurrence at sierra Mojada

      Jul 6, 2021

      An Occurrence at sierra Mojada
      16 min read

    • Article

      The Pursuit Of Love: Why Are We Still So Obsessed With The Mitford Sisters?

      May 11, 2021

      Is there any greater example of the Problematic Fave than the Mitford sisters? They were posh, gossipy, fabulous, stylish and politically extreme. Were a couple of them – let’s just say it – outrageously right-wing? Yes. But are we still – myself inc

      6 min read

    • Article

      Anthem For A Doomed Youth

      Jan 11, 2023

      Anthem For A Doomed Youth
      3 min read

    • Article

      An Officer And A Firebrand

      Dec 6, 2020

      An Officer And A Firebrand
      3 min read

    • Article

      Stories Of The Past, Worries Of The Present

      Jun 17, 2022

      Zibi has seen South Africa’s economy as a journalist, becoming editor of Business Day, and from within the corporate world, particularly as a spokesperson for a major bank. He has been increasingly dismayed by the waste of South Africa’s natural reso

      2 min read

    • Article

      Carry On Laughing

      Jun 29, 2022

      Carry On Laughing
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Superfight Narrative

      Jan 21, 2021

      The Superfight Narrative
      9 min read

    • Article

      Turkey Capital Of The World

      Jul 1, 2022

      Turkey Capital Of The World
      11 min read

    • Article

      Rule Breaker

      Jan 12, 2023

      Rule Breaker
      6 min read

    Reviews for Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails

    2.5/5

    10 ratings3 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      kind of unpleasant. i also have unpleasant family relationships and i know no one wants to hear about them. why does he expect his father to be different? if he wants to see him, he'll have to accept him the way he is. the only person you can change is yourself. why do men continue to look for respect from their unrespectable unloving fathers? just stay away from the shitheads.
    • 3/5
      I was so excited to get this book, because I love Anthony Swofford and absolutely adored Jarhead. But. Just couldn't do it with this one. The writing here and the narrative quality is gorgeous, it's just the subject matter of the father and son relationship over time and all of Swoffords various relationship exploits just didn't grab me at all. I don't think I'll try to pick this up later.
    • 1/5
      One of the worst memoirs I've ever read. The author spends the whole book bragging about his sexual prowess and conquests while berating his own father for the same activities. Toward the end he tries to claim moral high ground by claiming (I paraphrase) "I did all my oat-sowing in my thirties, you did it while you were married. I'd never do that to my wife and children." Conveniently IGNORING the fact that he was already married and fucked around on his first wife. This isn't even the worst of his sins.
      He endlessly whines about being disciplined 30 years in the past, even reminisces about how he gets together with friends to talk about their fathers. What the shit? You are a grown ass adult who has been to war. Quit bitching and grow up.
      The author moans about his daddy issues so hard that for the first 200 pages one gets the impression that his mother is dead. Nope. She eventually shows up, with no mention of when why or if they ever divorced.
      Then there is the section where he disrespects his family by refusing to accept a token award from the Daughters of the Confederacy.
      This is navel-gazing, self-aggrandizing, braggadocious bullshit from beginning to end by an effete nancy boy. Avoid at all costs.