Buster’s Book

About the Book

Providing insight in a family’s history against the backdrop of major world wars, Buster’s Book offers a collection of more than a thousand letters exchanged during the twentieth century as young men provided service to their country.

In this memoir, author Donald Junkins has compiled letters, diaries, interviews, recollections, and photographs of the family’s participants in both world wars and the Korean and Vietnam wars. This fascinating historical record includes the stories of a variety of escapades: from single-handedly opening an eight-year-old Nazi prison camp; to B-24 air forays from New Guinea in which an aerial gunner shot down two Japanese Zero planes; and to the rescue in Korea of wounded men stalled in a jeep in the middle of a freezing river that culminated in the awarding of the Silver Star.

Buster’s Book reflects both the lives of a middle-class American family during these years and the daily activities of two generations of young American men at war.

About the Author

Donald Junkins has won three National Endowment for the Arts Awards for his poems and most recently won the grand prize for a group of poems in New Letters. Junkins and his wife Kaimei Zheng live in Deerfield, Massachusetts.