SYNOPSIS

Jack "Half-Pint" Crowe drags the cruelty and abuse from his Southern past with him into the Vietnam War. Two tours of combat inflict physical wounds and moral damage, but they also deliver the ministrations of a Navy corpsman named Frank--a holy being who reads mysterious books and befriends Jack, coaxing him inward toward his own wholeness. When Frank is killed in battle, an anguished Half-Pint removes three blood-stained books from Frank's shredded pack.

Those books and his vow of nonviolence carry the Marine home to the swampy borderland of Louisiana and Arkansas. In that summer of return, Half-Pint plunges back into the atmosphere of hell he had longed to escape for good. Hunted by the fanatical Calvin Whitehead after offering help to his wife and son, his vow of non-violence is challenged in the murky swamplands of the Southern grotesque. He takes refuge in his new oil rig coworkers, a misfit cast of no-gooders on the verge of insanity brought on by the harsh conditions of their job and the undying meaninglessness of a life spent cheating death amid the pulse of true American blue collar work life.

It is through these folds we see the illumination of Half-Pint's evermoving quest for truth and meaning. Guided by Frank's bloodstained books, Half-Pint must shred all he knows to find the thing missing in all of us.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

QUOTES from the three books--

“Don't you think he may be pursuing an ideal that is hidden in a cloud of unknowing — like an astronomer looking for a star that only a mathematical calculation tells him exists?”

― William Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge

“Well, Larry is, I think, the only person I’ve ever met who’s completely disinterested. It makes his actions seem peculiar. We’re not used to persons who do things simply for the love of God whom they don’t believe in.”

― W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge

“Selfish action imprisons the world. Act selflessly, without any thought of personal profit.”

― Ved Vyasa, The Bhagavad Gita

The measure of your holiness is proportionate to the goodness of your will.

—John of Ruysbroeck, The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage