{"id":2188,"date":"2025-03-05T15:06:00","date_gmt":"2025-03-05T15:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=2188"},"modified":"2025-03-05T15:06:00","modified_gmt":"2025-03-05T15:06:00","slug":"book-review-the-lonely-veterans-guide-to-companionship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=2188","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: The Lonely Veteran\u2019s Guide to Companionship"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Lonely Veteran\u2019s Guide to Companionship<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

by Bronson Lemer<\/p>\n

Genre:<\/strong> Memoir \/ Iraq War<\/p>\n

ISBN: <\/strong>9780299350741<\/p>\n

Print Length:<\/strong> 184 pages<\/p>\n

Publisher:<\/strong> University of Wisconsin Press<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Reviewed by Peggy Kurkowski<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong>A globetrotting Army veteran and teacher reflects on the dynamic people, places, and moments that challenged his conceptions of community and belonging<\/strong>.<\/h2>\n

Former Army veteran Bronson Lemer reflects on his early years of wanderlust and the reasons for his rootlessness in The Lonely Veteran\u2019s Guide to Companionship, <\/em>a collection of lyrical and thoughtful essays.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

In a loosely organized compilation of pieces\u2014many of which previously published in journals\u2014Lemer lays out the foundational experiences that impacted his sense of identity from an early age. Beginning with \u201cGumshoe,\u201d Lemer pieces together the tragedy of an older sister he never knew, who was born and died on the same day in 1979. His parents\u2019 refusal to talk about her except in one-ended statements leads his precocious eleven-year-old\u2019s mind to dig for more information, aided by his love of solving the popular Carmen Sandiego novels. The stories were also a doorway into his future of traveling:<\/p>\n

\u201cReading those books, I learned to luxuriate in the pleasures of an active life. We were meant to move around this world, to explore, to attain knowledge, to live with meaning and purpose.\u201d <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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Moving from childhood, Lemer\u2019s next essay jumps right into Army basic training, where in \u201cBattle Buddy\u201d he reveals the first painful pangs of trying to fit in among \u201cgrunting, gun-loving, gung-ho men.\u201d<\/em><\/strong> The burgeoning awareness of his sexual orientation and the awkward exchanges with fellow soldiers are artfully depicted and will surely resonate with men and women who serve or have served in the U.S. military. It is an education he looks back on with wistfulness:<\/p>\n

\u201cAll my military training had conditioned me to want to adapt, to blend in \u2026 Years later, I would wonder how my life would have been different if the military hadn\u2019t forced me to tamp down what made me different, if I had embraced it earlier \u2026 instead of running from it.\u201d <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

After the Army, Lemer led a peripatetic life far from his North Dakota farm roots: first as a civilian teacher aboard a U.S. Navy ship and then as an expatriate living and teaching in China. His ruminations on China and the feelings of alienation that alternate with his passion for travel leap off the page in melodious prose. A boat ride through the Benxi Water Caves crystallizes his understanding of himself as \u201caimless, drifting, waiting for something to snag my collar and hold me in place.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Lemer delves into his complicated journey as a gay man living abroad, explaining how the expat life often sounded more romantic than the reality. He invokes his literary heroes (like Ernest Hemingway) to make sense of the tension between his desire to wander and his need to belong to someone, somewhere. <\/p>\n

In Hemingway\u2019s A Moveable Feast, <\/em>Lemer relates to the great author\u2019s expansive appetite for Paris, but recognizes that even Hemingway\u2019s sojourn abroad was not endless, and neither was his: \u201cI remember Hemingway left Paris vowing never again to live in a city \u2026 He never stayed in one place for very long. He kept looking and looking, trying to fill that emptiness \u2026 the way so many of us do.\u201d<\/em><\/strong> <\/p>\n

Along the way, Lemer chronicles his evolving acceptance of being gay and the relationships that taught him something about himself, holding up a mirror that is not always complimentary. It is this honesty that reveals the nature of the change in Lemer as he slowly shifts from a footloose and lonely vet to a man who finds a \u201cnew state of being\u201d<\/em><\/strong> with a house and a husband, in that order:<\/p>\n

\u201cI felt that I was building a new version of myself that had never before been constructed. A version that had until now existed only in my dreams.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Lonely Veteran\u2019s Guide to Companionship <\/em>is an absorbing journey through one man\u2019s shoes as he wrestles to find meaningful community in the world and all the way back home again.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Thank you for reading Peggy Kurkowski\u2019s book review of The Lonely Veteran\u2019s Guide to Companionship <\/em>by Bronson Lemer! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.<\/p>\n

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The post Book Review: The Lonely Veteran\u2019s Guide to Companionship<\/a> appeared first on Independent Book Review<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Lonely Veteran\u2019s Guide to Companionship by Bronson Lemer Genre: Memoir \/ Iraq War ISBN: 9780299350741 Print Length: 184 pages Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press Amazon Bookshop Reviewed by Peggy Kurkowski A globetrotting Army veteran and teacher reflects on the dynamic people, places, and moments that challenged his conceptions of community and belonging. Former Army […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":2189,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2188"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2188"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2188\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}