Operation Wandering Soul

Name: Operation Wandering Soul
Brand: Recorded Books
Availability: InStock
Author: Richard Powers
ISBN: 9781980016717

Author: Richard Powers

Narrator: Kirby Heyborne

Unabridged: 17 hr 50 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 06/24/2019

Categories: Fiction, Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Highly imaginative and emotionally powerful, this stunning novel about childhood innocence amid the nightmarish disease and deterioration at the heart of modern Los Angeles was nominated for a National Book Award. Tired and overworked, surgical resident Richard Kraft finds his protective shell shattered when, along with his physiotherapist, he begins to view the children's ward of the hospital. Determined to give hope where there is none, the adults spin a desperate anthology of stories that promise restoration and escape.

About Richard Powers

Richard Powers is the author of New York Times bestseller Bewilderment; The Overstory, which won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; and The Echo Maker, which won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; among many other novels. Powers has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Historical Fiction, and is a four-time National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Simon on October 19, 2017

"OWS" was a psychological warfare tactic employed to disrupt the enemy during the Vietnam War and Richard Powers adopted it for a title to his book about the plight of children worldwide and across time, a topic sadly relevant today as ever. Just this morning headlines include a story of widespread......more

Goodreads review by Kevin on June 16, 2023

Way more eye opening reading this for a second time as a parent. Richard Powers is one of the greats.......more

Goodreads review by Craig on July 18, 2024

Operation Wandering Soul, named after a bizarre psychological warfare operation during the Vietnam war era--the U.S. broadcast the voices of "deceased ancestors" over villages--is probably Powers' most difficult, but also deeply rewarding novels. The thematic center is the ongoing violence against c......more

Goodreads review by Geoff on January 19, 2014

With this review of Operation Wandering Soul, I also recommend all of Richard Powers' novels. His novels range across the spectrum of United States taken on industry and cancer (Gain) and so much more. Operation Wandering Soul delivers a frentic kalideoscopical narrative that maps the US incursions......more

Goodreads review by Stewart on March 05, 2021

This is easily the darkest and least accessible Powers novel I've read yet, and I'm not entirely sure whether to admire it or be confounded by it. His work is always overtly autobiographical, which is what makes this one's bleakness hard to swallow. It's a story of children dying, literally and figu......more