Gajdusek’s compelling memoir, Resurrection, A War Journey, is not strictly about facts. Rather, it is his earnest, groping attempt—after more than 50 years—to overpower his ‘recalcitrant mind’ and confront the horrors he has not been able to write about. Using a peripatetic style to get at the truth, Gajdusek jumps from World War II archival material to poetry, short stories, and vivid, terrifying, and sometimes surreal reflections. . . . Like a frantic ancient mariner, Gajdusek transfixes readers with his searing, honest memoir. He invites us, he writes in the preface, ‘to a place you have not been’ to discover ‘what of value can be resurrected from the dying and suffering.’
Gajdusek’s compelling memoir, Resurrection: A War Journey, is not strictly about facts. Rather, it is his earnest, groping attempt—after more than 50 years—to overpower his ‘recalcitrant mind’ and confront the horrors he has not been able to write about. Using a peripatetic style to get at the truth, Gajdusek jumps from World War II archival material to poetry, short stories and vivid, terrifying and sometimes surreal reflections.... Like a frantic ancient mariner, Gajdusek transfixes readers with his searing, honest memoir. He invites us, he writes in teh preface, “to a place you have not been’ to discover ‘what of value can be resurrected from the dying and suffering.” —San Francisco Chronicle
"Gajdusek provides an in-depth, multi-layered, and personal memoir of his combat experience and its aftermath. Resurrection takes many turns and twists in time and space and is filled with surprising revelations such as finding peace of mind while being a prisoner of war. . . . The ultimate lesson of Resurrection is pro-humanity, not anti-war. That is why stories like these need to be told and read." —North Dakota Quarterly
“[T]he horror of war is given a personal treatment in Gajdusek’s narrative.” —War, Literature & the Arts
"Gajdusek's story, written 50 years after the events, has both the immediacy of a journal written on the spot by a boy, and the maturity of that boy grown into a poet. Gajdusek's introspection is a grenade; it shatters even the possibility of being glib about war.This rough-fragile memoir belongs, honorably, on everyone's not very crowded shelf of war books." —Paul H. Stacy, Professor Emeritus of Modern Literature University of Hartford
“The terrain of Gajdusek’s World War II is a landscape and inscape as luminous palimpsest, as an intricate and compelling act of narrativity where all is redeemed in knowledge carried to the heart. And Gajdusek makes the reader see and feel and believe the facts, the horror, the magic and the mystery, and the great white bird descending and ascending, soaring over the numinous landscape of this remarkable book.” — H.R. Stoneback, Director of Graduate Program, SUNY at New Paltz