Love, hate, and memories are the drivers that propel us through life's confusing mazes and narrowly missed collisions with others that can change the arc of our fates. A Thousand Cranes tackles some of the issues of the often hidden and lingering effects of the Vietnam war on men struggling to construct useful civilian lives after surviving the uncivil life of that conflict. For college professors like Roland and Alex, or campus cop Butch, not even the relative calm and structure of academic life in a small Southern California college can fully ease the abiding terrors of their Vietnam years. Is it even possible to simply think your way out of deep emotional trauma? Is the presence of loving family and friends enough to quiet the disturbing voices in the back of the mind? If higher education cannot cure the more deeply embedded dysfunctions of good men, then what is its purpose? And, above all, what are the effects of their problems on the people they love and who care about them? Tracking the stories of third-generation immigrants with roots in Eastern Europe, this novel casts a wide net in examining its characters' disparate, but ultimately related, sagas. It is a large world, but the basic human drama of survival and the larger challenge of how to form a caring environment for the planet's caretakers is indeed a shared experience, as the characters in this rewarding book discover.