The High Country Illuminator

Garden City NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc.. Near Fine in Near Fine dj. 1971. Later Printing. Hardcover. [nice tight copy, just a touch of wear at the spine ends (both book and jacket)]. The third published novel by this journalist/novelist/historian, who first became known for his prize-winning dispatches from Vietnam in the 1960s (and his later-filmed Vietnam War novel "Incident at Muc Wa"), and has turned out a dozen or so books, both fiction and non-fiction, often on military-themed topics. About this novel, described on the jacket as "a tale of light and darkness and the ski-bums of Avalon," the author has stated that it was his intention "to catch the manic life of Aspen [model for the fictional "Avalon"] toward the end of the 1960s, a time of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, marijuana, and disgust at a government that would send its young men to fight other young men in Vietnam." This is not a first printing (it lacks the requisite "first edition" statement), but otherwise is a very nice copy of the original Doubleday edition. (The author himself has kept the book in print through various platforms, so if you just want a reading copy you don't need to spend this kind of money; however, this jacket is a lot more evocative of the period than the later cover design.) .