The year is 1961. America has a new president, named John F. Kennedy, and a new era the newspapers are calling the Dawn of Camelot. But for ten-year-old Paul Brett, dealing with an abusive father and the immigrant gangs roaming his slum neighborhood of China Slough, America is only a small, dead-end place he is struggling to survive.
That is, until the night a mysterious stranger comes out of the darkness to his rescue, and initiates a journey—an unforgettable odyssey—beyond his wildest imagination.
From his unlikely beginnings in a brutal California migrant camp, into the darkest underbelly of a distant and unpopular war, to his final and, perhaps, most deadly struggle for survival inside the bowels of a near-medieval military prison, American Warrior follows this amazing journey of one young hero from boyhood to manhood, and from love lost, to his final and most incredible attempts to regain that love.
James Snyder was born in Memphis, Tennessee and fell in love with the cadence and sound of storytelling as a child, listening to the meandering tales of his Southern grandmothers and great aunts. While still a child, his family moved to Napa Valley, California where he attended middle and high school, and began taking writing classes at the local college. He left after a year to join the military, and was a soldier with a tactical mobile operations unit in Germany. It was there, while pulling a Harz mountaintop guard duty one night during a snowstorm, he had the chance encounter with another soldier that ultimately became the genesis for his debut novel American Warrior.
“Berlin Diaries” is his blog at JamesSnyder.net where he further discusses the backgrounds of this and other writings.
He currently lives in Texas.
Author web: jamessnyder.net.