Who Shot the Water Buffalo?: A Novel Review

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(More customer reviews)Since its first public mention in the pages of Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" (a type-written manuscript in a cardboard box "lying there amid all the general debris and madness" in the garage where the Merry Pranksters and Ken Kesey were working on the Furthur bus), the world has been waiting for Ken Babbs' debut novel.
Set in the early days of the Vietnam War - when the United States was there simply to, uh, "provide support" - "Who Shot The Water Buffalo?" combines humor, drama, and the sort of wordplay you'd expect from the Intrepid Traveler himself. Babbs knows of what he writes - he piloted choppers in Vietnam before he got on the bus - and it shows. The narration morphs and shifts as the weirdness of the situation increases for Majors Mike Huckelbee and Tom Cochran; Babbs navigates sweat-soaked stream-of-consciousness raps as easily as he does passages of gonzo slapstick.
It's been close to 50 years since Babbs starting typing "Who Shot The Water Buffalo?" out in the jungles of Vietnam. It was well worth the wait.

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Ken Babbs, famously a Merry Prankster and the best friend and working partner of Ken Kesey, has at last finished his first novel - and the wait was worth it. Lieutenant Tom Huckelbee, leathery as any Texican come crawling out of the sage, and Lieutenant Mike Cochran, loquacious son of an Ohio gangster, make an unlikely pair training to be Marine chopper pilots on their way to Vietnam. The dynamic takes the reader from a couple of know-nothing young men straight out of flight school, to Marine aviators caught in the middle of a disorienting war. Tough and comical, quiet and boisterous, and always vivid and poetic, Babbs is a writer at the top of his craft. Who Shot the Water Buffalo? manages to capture the world in all its guts and glory through the eyes of a young man discovering what it means to be beholden to another. A book not to be missed.

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