Dust to Dust: A Memoir

Dust to Dust is an extraordinary memoir about life and landscape, mortality and memory, the farm and the battlefield, the adventures of childhood and the revelations of adulthood. Writing with enormous poignancy, Benjamin Busch, a decorated U.S. Marine Corps infantry officer and the son of celebrated novelist Frederick Busch, has crafted a lasting book about our place in time to stand with the finest work of Tim O'Brien or Annie Dillard.

From his pastoral childhood in rural New York to Marine training in North Carolina, Ukraine, and California; from a boyhood of fort building and exploration to deployment during the worst of the war in Iraq, in Dust to Dust Busch offers much more than a war memoir. Here is an unforgettable meditation on life and loss, the longing for the elemental and the call of the wild, and how the curious children we were remain alive in us all.