Hero: The Life and Death of Audie Murphy - Softcover

The most-decorated soldier of World War II, Murphy became a movie star in the late 1940s, squandered a fortune by gambling, was tried and acquitted for attempted murder shortly before his death in a plane crash in 1971. According to Whiting, Murphy had little personality and lived an emotionally bleak life with the exception of the 30 months he spent in combat. Whiting describes Murphy's poverty-stricken childhood in Texas, follows his blazing trail throughout the war, his failed marriages, his almost somnambulistic career in movies and his increasingly erratic behavior toward the end of his life, arguing that Murphy in postwar years displayed classic symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder. In this tedious biography, the author does not explain satisfactorily what motivated the teenage Murphy to turn in to a German-slaughtering demon on repeated occasions, or why he spent the subsequent 26 years of his life in a largely passive state of boredom and crushing depression. Whiting's books include Massacre at Malmedy and other histories of World War II. Photos.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Whiting, a prolific writer of books about World War II, has produced a biography of Murphy, the most decorated American soldier of that war. Murphy returned to the States a hero at age 21, and he went on to a mediocre movie career until his death in a plane crash in 1971. Most of the book recounts Murphy's wartime exploits. This is reasonable, inasmuch as Murphy's two years of combat formed the central experience of his life, and it is Whiting's thesis that Murphy's problems after the war were due to post-traumatic stress disorder. Additional original research would have helped the book, as would less repetition and fewer rhetorical questions, but Hero is a tolerable biography.John Smothers, Monmouth Cty. Lib., Manalapan, N.J.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.