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  • American Requiem

    The Sum Of Moments.

    Don J. Snyder

     

    For those I lost and never lost

    We are all refugees
    from one war torn country
    or another
    from one war torn love story
    or another.
    Nothing means anything anymore.
    We haven't seen our friends in years.
    To talk with, I mean.
    Really talk with.

    We live in big houses
    but find little rest there.
    And I don't even know
    what it means that
    I was named after my mother's
    favorite cousin, Donnie.
    Or why I have carried
    his photograph with me for
    almost half a century. It was taken at the end of 1950
    with only black and white film.
    So the colors in his tattoos,
    an intricate riot of color
    like the ceiling
    of the Sistine Chapel,
    are lost to the world now
    except in my memory.
    And I am the only person
    left who would remember.
    He had the first one
    burned into his left arm
    in shock
    that he somehow survived
    the battle of Guadalcanal
    in the winter of 1943.
    Then the right arm just before
    the battle of Okinawa
    where he knew that he would die
    and never get home to marry
    the only girl he'd ever loved.
    He did not know, of course,
    that in his absence
    state troopers
    from the barracks
    in the next town
    were riding
    her skirts up her thighs.
    This was at a time when guys and girls
    often got up to mischief
    in cars parked around Green Lake.
    Those cops had been exempt
    from the war
    and were on the prowl
    like sharks in a sea
    of lonely girls
    to whom virginity
    had come to seem like
    someone else's bad idea.
    A foolish waste of something.
    What happened to Donnie
    after they were married
    and had quickly brought
    two beautiful little troublemakers
    into the world,
    you will learn at the end of this poem
    after I have recalled everything else that
    I can remember of my life in America
    that is ending like the country is.
    I mean the country
    that Donnie fought for.
    For now, I think it is sad enough
    to begin this by telling you
    what I have just told you.

  • The Tin Nose Shop (2022)

    The Tin Nose Shop was published in London by The Legends Press Ltd. and chosen as a BBC Radio 2 Book Club selection. The Audio edition was published by W.F. Howes LTD.

    For most of us, it takes a while to realise that we cross lines in our lives. Silent, unmarked borders of time that we pass, as if in our dreams, without ever realising what we are leaving behind. We do not see that the matchless nights of being cherished and held close are vanishing even as we live them, and that we are all refugees from one war torn country or another, or from one war torn love story or another. Time moves so deceptively that we never say, ‘This is the last walk I will take with you along the shore.’ Or ‘This afternoon I carried a child in my arms for the final time.’ Perhaps early this morning while we dressed and put the kettle on, our destiny advanced, unwatched.
    A BBC RADIO 2 BOOK CLUB RECOMMENDED READ
    INSPIRED BY ONE OF THE LAST GREAT UNTOLD STORIES OF WW1 1916. Young artist Sam Burke is spared death by firing squad on the battlefields of France and brought to a remote castle by the Irish Sea. At the ‘Tin Nose Shop’ he is tasked with creating intricate masks to hide the mutilated faces of his fellow soldiers from the Front. While he tries to come to terms with the death of his best friend and the promise he failed to keep, Sam and the disfigured soldiers struggle to return to their former lives and their loved ones. A stirring and emotional tale based on the real-life story of the Tin Nose Shop. 'Beautifully written and sensitively observed' Hazel Gaynor 'Beautifully written and thought-provoking' Ruth Hogan 'Will both break your heart and give it wings as it explores the healing powers of friendship, love, hope and purpose' Robin Wells 'One of the best historical novels I have read in a long time... I have never read anything quite like it' Mark Sullivan 'Here is a beautifully written novel, sensitive, exploring not so much the brutality of war but the humanity which stems from it' The Yorkshire Times 'There are many novels based on the events of World War I; this one has to be among the most compassionate and moving' Historical Novel Society

  • Walking With Jack (2013)

    A long-standing promise from a father to his five-year-old son . . .

     

    A poignant diary that chronicles the journey

     

    When Don Snyder was teaching the game of golf to his young son, Jack, they made a pact: if one day Jack became good enough to play on a pro golf tour, Don would walk beside him as his caddie.

  • The Winter Travelers (2011)

  • Winter Dreams (2004)

  • Of Time & Memory (2001)

    Don Snyder knew nothing about his mother aside from the terrible fact that she died at the age of nineteen, just sixteen days after giving birth to him and his twin brother. All his life Don had been too shy, too deeply pained to ask his father or grandparents to tell him the story of the lovely girl named Peggy Snyder--what delighted or troubled her, who her friends were, how she fell in love, what cut short her brief life.

  • Night Crossing (2001)

    A novel of political intrigue (the time is 1998) with overtones of a classic Hitchcock thriller; a story of a romantic encounter—of two strangers suddenly invading each other’s lives.

     

    Night Crossing carries us from a quiet Boston suburb to a wild pursuit across the northern counties of Ireland. The man and woman who find themselves bound together are from two different worlds.

  • Fallen Angel (2001)

    The death of his estranged father draws Hollywood film executive Terry McQuinn back to the coastal Maine town of his roots and gives him the chance to make long-overdue peace with his late father, come to terms with the events of the past, and rediscover the mysteries of family and love.

     

    Adapted  into a Hallmark Hall of Fame TV production that aired December 2003.

  • The Cliff Walk (1998)

    Snyder's account of temporarily losing his way in life presents a heartrending and inspiring memoir that "confronts the not-so-secret fear that haunts every American who works for a living"  ("Atlanta Journal-Constitution"). Author publicity.

  • From The Point (1989)

    Jack, Ross, and Casey, growing up in the 1960s, spend a summer together on Hancock Point. Ross is drafted, leaving Casey pregnant with a child she aborts. Their lives diverge till, in their mid-30s, Jack decides that "going back to Hancock Point would give them all a chance to see exactly what was left of their past." Though Ross is married, Casey decides to have his child. We see mainly Casey "crashing along . . . with wounds," as she indulges in a lot of morbid reminiscing.

  • Veterans Park (1988)

    At a distance, young men in uniform satisfy all our vague longings for grace and order. Bobbi Ann Mullens watched these young men from the time she was a little girl riding on her father's tractor, wedged between his knees when he sang his song to her, the song he sand when he took her to town perched like a parrot on his arm, the song he sand like a lullaby at night in her bedroom when the windmill in the backyard sliced the moon into narrow white bars of light that fell across her blankets.

  • Soldier's Disgrace (1987)

    U.S. Army Maj. Ronald Alley survived three years in a North Korean prison camp only to be charged with collaboration on his return to freedom. Found guilty, he was dishonorably discharged and sent to Leavenworth, the only U.S. officer in this century to receive such a sentence. This riveting book reveals what Sen. William Cohen of Maine, a partisan of the late Alley, has called a gross violation of justice.

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Don J. Snyder

AUTHOR

From the time I was seventeen years old I wanted to write important books and movies that would bring meaning - DEEP MEANING - into peoples' lives. I wanted it so badly that from the time I was 21 until I turned 34 I locked myself in a room and lived alone like a monk, reading the classics over and over while I taught myself how to write luminous sentences that revealed the great truths about life and love and friendship. The stuff that is important in this world. I gave 12 years of my life to this education without any guarantee that anything I ever wrote would be good or that I would ever see a word of my writing published. But I dreamed the big dream that my books would be published by the great illustrious publishing houses of New York City - a million miles away from where I was locked in my room. Random House. Little Brown. Doubleday. Simon & Schuster. And above all the others - Alfred A. Knopf - the most respected literary publisher in the world. I wanted this so badly that if someone had come along then and said, Ok, we'll make a bargain with you, Don. You cut off your right arm and we'll grant you your dream. I would have said, No, thanks. But you can cut off my left. And that is the truth. That is how badly I wanted this. I wanted beyond hope and dreaming to become a novelist.

ABOUT ME

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TV APPEARANCES

RADIO INTERVIEWS

INSIDE "OF TIME & MEMORY"

OPRAH SHOW

TODAY SHOW

FILM

Golden Globe® and Emmy Award® winner Gary Sinise plays Terry McQuinn, a high-powered Los Angeles lawyer who learns a powerful lesson about second chances. When his father dies, Terry returns to his Maine home. He is reunited with Katherine Wentworth (Joely Richardson), whose family had employed the services of Terry's father as caretaker and handyman on the Wentworth summer estate for decades. A secret from Terry and Katherine's past turns out to be the key to their future—and a reminder that it's never too late to forgive—and never too late to fall in love.

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