Taps

The final work from one of America''s most beloved authors and an instant classic TAPS takes readers on one last fictional journey to Willie Morris''s South and spins a tender powerful very American story about the vanishing beauty of a charmed way of life and the fleeting boyhood of a young man coming of age in a time of war. In Fisks Landing Mississippi at the dawn of the Korean War sixteen-year-old Swayze Barksdale is suddenly called to an unexpected duty - playing Taps at the gravesides of the towns young casualties sent home from the front. Gradually Swayze begins to pace his life around these all too frequent funerals where his horn sounds the tragic note of the times. At turns funny at turns poignant TAPS abounds with colorful characters and yet sings and sighs . . . with a kind of minor key wistfulness (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette) as Swayze learns what it means to be a patriot a son a lover a friend a man.