Book Blurb & Info
After barely graduating Dave gets drafted into the army and sent to guard a nuclear weapons depot in Korea. There he runs afoul of his sergeant and must scramble to avoid dishonorable discharge.
‘As Good As Can Be’ draws on the author’s experiences growing up in an out-of-control military family during the 1950’s and his own military experience.
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At the beginning of the book, Dave's family live in Iran until his mother accidentally hits and kills an Iranian man with her car. In order to protect the family and avoid retribution from the local people, the Knight's leave Iran and return to America, upending 5 year old Dave's life. Whether or not this or other contributing factors (like his father's alcoholism) led to Dave's rebelliousness as a teenager is up in the air. Either way the boy goes through quite a phase as a young adult. Stealing cars, getting into fights and getting in trouble with his high school teachers, Dave has more than one run in with police and only begins to mend his wicked ways when he is drafted into the Vietnam War.
As I am sure happened with many real life young men during that time, Dave finds that the life of a soldier grounds him and he soon finds a wife and settles down. Without spoiling anything, the ending gave me a warm feeling in my chest and a little tear in my eye. I really felt like I got to know and appreciate Dave as a character who was just crying out for love in all the wrong ways. 'As Good As Can Be' is as good as it gets! I give it 5 stars.
William A. Glass, formerly a VP at Gallup, now coaches soccer at a small college in South Carolina and writes. He lives with wife, Bettina, who is a high school German teacher. They have three sons who have all moved away to pursue careers.
Guest Post
Though ‘As Good As Can Be’ is a work of fiction, it draws from your experiences
growing up. Can you tell us about one or two experiences that are not in
the book? Also, why did you decide to write fiction rather than a memoir?
Quite a few real-life
episodes didn’t get used in the book. One that came
close occurred in 1955 when my family traveled to Europe on the SS United
States. On the last night of the voyage, my parents were invited to dine with
the captain. They left my sister, then 11, in charge of her four younger
siblings. We played nicely until eleven or so when the fighting started.
After a storm of complaints from neighboring cabins, the deck steward tried but
couldn’t stop the mayhem. He called on a ship’s officer who also failed to
halt the effusion of blood. The officer reluctantly went up to the
first-class dining room for a word with the captain, who then asked Lt. Colonel
Glass to restore order in his cabin. My father had been charming the
socks off of a Duchess (or so he claimed) and was so irate at being interrupted
that he kept us children up for the rest of the night which meant we were all
asleep that morning when the ship made a brief stop to let passengers off in
Liverpool. Dad was still awake, however, and
went ashore. Later he rubbed it in that he saw England and we
didn’t. The ship landed in Bremerhaven that evening, and the Glass family
spent the next four years in Germany.
Another episode that occurred
in real life and almost made it into the book is when I went to visit my older
sister after she trapped a boy from college into marrying her. She was living
with him, his mother, and her child on a beautiful stretch of the Chesapeake
Bay on the Eastern shore of Maryland. The mother-in-law was a cold, blue-blood. The son was a spoiled rich kid who seemed more
interested in his toys (airplane, sport-fishing boat, and race car) then the
child. The three of them were living in an antebellum plantation house complete
with African American servants. In the morning, I went up in the plane
with my brother-in-law, who tried mightily to get me to throw up. When that
failed, he took to dive-bombing the house to
wake my sister up. I had a private chat
with my sister before I left. She admitted
that things were very tense in the house, and she felt completely isolated.
However, anything was better than being a home
dependent on our father!
My decision to make my story into a novel was a long time coming. I started off
to write a memoir and got half-way through before realizing that I hated it.
Writing in the first person, past tense with me as the narrator was
tedious. I didn’t feel that I could leave things out, so it was one move
after another with a never-ending series of knock-down-drag-out fights. For the
novel, I switched to third person present tense and
had an omniscient narrator, which meant that I could relate scenes that I (my
character) wasn’t in. Also, I could imagine dialogue and make it a voice-driven
book complete with humor to leaven the
pathos. The objective was to keep As Good As Can Be light and make it entertaining. I believe the novel succeeds at that.
The memoir was a bore!
Toot's Review by Betty Bee
As Good As Can Be by William A. Glass
A coming of age novel for the ages! A lot of secret and misunderstood things can go on in a young boy's head and heart. I've always been one to say that rebellious and rambunctious boys are usually just misunderstood and begging for attention. This book is about one such boy who becomes a man and then a soldier. Dave Knight grew up with an Army officer father in the 1950's, living in many places all over the world and leaving a reputation wherever he went. At the beginning of the book, Dave's family live in Iran until his mother accidentally hits and kills an Iranian man with her car. In order to protect the family and avoid retribution from the local people, the Knight's leave Iran and return to America, upending 5 year old Dave's life. Whether or not this or other contributing factors (like his father's alcoholism) led to Dave's rebelliousness as a teenager is up in the air. Either way the boy goes through quite a phase as a young adult. Stealing cars, getting into fights and getting in trouble with his high school teachers, Dave has more than one run in with police and only begins to mend his wicked ways when he is drafted into the Vietnam War.
As I am sure happened with many real life young men during that time, Dave finds that the life of a soldier grounds him and he soon finds a wife and settles down. Without spoiling anything, the ending gave me a warm feeling in my chest and a little tear in my eye. I really felt like I got to know and appreciate Dave as a character who was just crying out for love in all the wrong ways. 'As Good As Can Be' is as good as it gets! I give it 5 stars.
Author Info
Author Links
Website: https://williamaglass.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/william.glass.50767?ref=bookmarks
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/williamasaglass/
Website: https://williamaglass.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/william.glass.50767?ref=bookmarks
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/williamasaglass/
~Giveaway~
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