Shake the Devil Off (Hardcover) ~ Ethan Brown (Author) Cover Art

Shake the Devil Off (Hardcover)

By: Ethan Brown (Author)


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Review

"[A] powerful indictment of our ineffective political establishment and seemingly unfeeling military bureaucracy....Like Dave Eggers's recent ZEITOUN, SHAKE THE DEVIL OFF is essential reading for those willing to face the awful truths about New Orleans -- our nation's most misunderstood city -- and the trials its residents still face every day."

"The book's strengths are [Brown's] dogged reporting and his willingness to investigate whether the military can do better by soldiers with PTSD and whether this murder-suicide was, like the Katrina disaster, preventable."

"[T]he value of this provocative, if imperfect, book lies in its careful examination of a tragic crime; the author has also made a significant contribution to the literature about the Iraq war."

"[Brown's] detailed reconstruction of both Brown's life and the city's deterioration make heartbreaking reading." (starred review)

Publisher's note

Documents the sensational murder of bartender Addie Hall by suicide victim Zackery Bowen, an Iraq veteran whose party-endurance relationship with Addie had caused them to be featured by news outlets as symbolic of the New Orleans spirit, in an account that features the author's investigation into Bowen's motivations. 40,000 first printing.

Documents the sensational murder of bartender Addie Hall by suicide victim Zackery Bowen, an Iraq veteran whose party-endurance relationship with Addie had caused them to be featured by news outlets as symbolic of the New Orleans spirit, in an account that features the author's investigation into Bowen's motivations. 40,000 first printing.

A charismatic young soldier meets a tragic end in this moving and mesmerizing account of the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and no-safety-net America

Zackery Bowen was thrust into two of America's largest recent debacles. He was one of the first soldiers to encounter the fledgling insurgency in Iraq. After years of military service he returned to New Orleans to tend bar and deliver groceries. In the weeks before Hurricane Katrina made landfall, he met Addie Hall, a pretty and high-spirited bartender. Their improvised, hard-partying endurance during and after the storm had news outlets around the world featuring the couple as the personification of what so many want to believe is the indomitable spirit of New Orleans.

But in October 2006, Bowen leaped from the rooftop bar of a French Quarter hotel. A note in his pocket directed the police to the body of Addie Hall. It was, according to NOPD veterans, one of the most gruesome crimes in the city's history. How had this popular, handsome father of two done this horrible thing?

Journalist Ethan Brown moved from New York City to the French Quarter in order to investigate this question. Among the newsworthy elements in the book is Brown's discovery that this tragedy--like so many others--could have been avoided if the military had simply not, in the words of Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, "absolutely and completely failed this soldier." "Shake the Devil Off" is a mesmerizing tribute to these lives lost.

Annotation

In this harrowing account of a New Orleans murder-suicide, journalist Ethan Brown reveals how post-traumatic stress disorder, brought on by the Iraq war and reinforced by Hurricane Katrina, caused an ex-soldier named Zackery Bowen to brutally murder his girlfriend before jumping to his own death from the roof of a hotel in the French Quarter. Prior to enlisting in the army, Bowen was a high-school dropout, an aspiring musician, and a teenage husband and father who hoped to elevate his station in life through military service. No one who knew him then could have conceived that he would be capable of murder. But after enduring the daily torment of battling the insurgents of Iraq, Bowen returned home a changed man. His marriage dissolved, and he got locked into a cycle of substance abuse and unemployment. When he met a spirited poet and bartender named Addie Hall, it seemed that she might hold the key to his redemption, but Mother Nature had other plans. As Brown reports, Hurricane Katrina took the last of Zackery's resolve, and he and Addie could be counted as the final casualties of the storm, a little more than a year after it hit. By sharing the tragedy of Zackery and Addie, Brown is able to equate the government's appalling lack of adequate reaction to the hurricane with its abandonment of the thousands of Gulf War soldiers suffering from PTSD.



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