This is a musician’s tale: the story of a boy growing up on the Iron Range, playing his guitar at family gatherings, coming of age in the psychedelic seventies, and honing his craft as a pro in Minneapolis, ground zero of American popular music in the mid-eighties. “There is a drop of blood behind every note I play and every word I write,” Paul Metsa says. And it’s easy to believe, as he conducts us on a musical journey across time and country, navigating switchbacks, detours, dead ends, and providing us the occasional glimpse of the promised land on the blue guitar highway. His account captures the thrill of the Twin Cities when acts like the Replacements, Husker Dü, and Prince were remaking pop music. It takes us right onto the stages he shared with stars like Billy Bragg, Pete Seeger, and Bruce Springsteen. And it gives us a close-up, dizzying view of the roller-coaster ride that is the professional musician’s life, played out against the polarizing politics and intimate history of the past few decades of American culture. Written with a songwriter’s sense of detail and ear for poetry, Paul Metsa’s book conveys all the sweet absurdity, dry humor, and passion for the language of music that has made his story sing.

In this compelling oral history, Navy medical personnel from World War II recall their experiences and the role Navy medicine played in the great crusade. Physicians, nurses, and corpsmen report the way it was, matter-of-factly, with pride and pathos, but not without humor. These are the veterans whose skills were tested at Pearl Harbor, Corregidor, Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Normandy, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. Readers will appreciate as never before the single-minded purpose to which the men and women of Navy medicine dedicated themselves as they healed the wounded aboard vessels under kamikaze attack, in POW camps, and still other appalling circumstances. Former pharmacist's mate Wheeler Lipes describes the time, mythologized by Hollywood and the press, when he removed a shipmate's appendix while his submarine cruised submerged in enemy waters. Dr. Henry Heimlich reveals how a failed chest surgery performed on a wounded Chinese soldier later inspired the lifesaving maneuver that has made his name a household word throughout the world. Cardiologist Dr. Howard Bruenn remembers Franklin D. Roosevelt's last moments at Warm Springs. Stanley Dabrowski recalls the confusion and terror at Iwo Jima as he, a pharmacist's mate, treated his first sucking chest wound under fire. Dr. Ferdinand Berley tells about hearing, while a POW, the Japanese emperor announce the war's end over the radio.

From the sinking of the British passenger liner Athenia on September 3, 1939, by a German U-boat (against orders) to the Japanese surrender on board the Missouri on September 2, 1945, War at Sea covers every major naveal battle of World War II. "A first-rate work and the best history of its kind yet written".--Vice Admiral William P. Mack, U.S.N. (Ret.). 30 photos.