“On its surface Shaking Hands with Billy is the story of one man’s odyssey. And odyssey is, I believe, the correct word, neither overstatement nor misrepresentation. To be sure, many chapters in Anthony Turton’s personal narrative describe the recruitment and work of a Cold War soldier – instilling in him a sense of detachment, manifest in that chilling, if necessary, “thousand yard stare”. Yet it is less a tactical, macho, warrior epic like the Odyssey than an alienated veteran’s dragged-out struggle, his repeated attempts to reconcile himself to a political landscape that is both strange and at times uncomfortable, and then to embrace the chaos and complexity as, for better or worse, his only home.”
James G. Workman
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