The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no long… - William Styron

At any rate, during the few hours when the depressive state itself eased off long enough to permit the luxury of concentration, I had recently filled this vacuum with fairly extensive reading and I had absorbed many fascinating and troubling facts

"A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it." — William Styron (born June 11 1925)

For General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, military life may be symbolized by "beacons flashing across uncharted depths . . . faint bugles sounding reveille," but for many if not most of his countrymen it is something else: it is reveille. It is training manuals and twenty-mile hikes, stupefying lectures on platoon tactics and terrain and the use of the Lister bag, mountains of administrative paperwork, compulsive neatness and hideous barracks in Missouri and Texas, sexual deprivation, hot asphalt drill fields and deafening rifle ranges, daily tedium unparalleled in its ferocity, awful food, bad pay, ignorant people and a ritualistic demand for ass-kissing almost unique in the quality of its humiliation. The world that MacArthur thrills to makes most of his fellow Americans choke with horror.