Dust to Dust: A Memoir

"I knew very early that I was a solitary being. I longed for the elemental. As a child I was drawn to wilderness, the reckless water of oceans, rivers, and rain, the mountains of stones and sand, and the ruins left vacant by human decline, neglect, and tragedy. War was wilderness, and I went there too." -- from the Prologue
DUST TO DUST is an extraordinary memoir about ordinary things: life and death, war and peace, the explorations of childhood and revelations of adulthood. Benjamin Busch -- U.S. Marine who served two combat tours in Iraq, actor on The Wire, and son of celebrated novelist Frederick Busch -- has crafted a THIS BOY'S LIFE for our time.
In chapters themed around elemental things -- water, metal, bone, blood -- Busch moves back and forth in time and weaves together a vivid record of a pastoral childhood in rural New York, to marine training in North Carolina and California, to the worst of the war in Iraq. But this is much more than a war memoir: Busch writes with great poignancy and enormous emotional power about the resonance of formative experiences throughout life. Most of all, Busch writes movingly about moments of danger and death, real and imagined: in a helicopter, going down; being hit by shrapnel in Iraq; playing a dead man on television; dealing with the sudden death of friends in combat and parents at home. The result is an unforgettable meditation on how the decomposition of the dead becomes the composition of the living, and how the children we were remains alive in us all.
DUST TO DUST heralds the arrival of a great new literary voice, and it will make you view your own childhood -- and all that's come after it -- in a rich new light.