Winner of the National Book Award in the nonfiction category, James Carroll’s An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us is an excellent memoir of life in America during the Vietnam War era.

The son of General Joseph Carroll, a Chicagoan of Irish descent and a successful FBI agent who served under J. Edgar Hoover, Carroll says he wrote the book in an attempt “to lay the past to rest once and for all.”

Ordained a Paulist priest in 1969, Carroll left the priesthood in 1975 and two years later he married writer Alexandra Marshall. Carroll, still a practicing Catholic, says that he left the priesthood, not the church, and he seems to view his writing career as another sort of priesthood.

Carroll has written nine previous novels, including Mortal Friends (1978) which has sold more than one million copies, Prince of Peace (1984) and Memorial Bridge (1991).