Preview of Soldier Boy Summary:

Soldier Boy contains some of Shaara's finest moments in fiction, and in his "Introduction" and his "Afterword" he hints at how they came out of his life and into his art. For Shaara, "writing has always meant . . . going for a while into another, real world," where flashes of insight are waiting, like Michelangelo's shapes, for the artist to set them free. Just as Chamberlain in The Killer Angels (1974) could not grasp the meaning of tragedy until he had lived it, at his best Shaara can make his reader share those times, a communication that he says has been, after his writing, "the best moment[s] in living as a writer: to know that somebody else has seen what you see, felt what you felt."

Ten of Soldier Boy's stories are science fiction, dating from the 1950s. The genre allowed Shaara to distance himself from...