Old Man in a Baseball Cap: A Memoir of World War II

Rochlin, a WWII combat veteran, developed this wartime memoir after taking a storytelling workshop from monologuist Spalding Gray. Adopting Gray's form of free-associational autobiographical remembrance, he compiled--through the act of live delivery--a collection of spoken pieces about his experiences as an Army Air Corps navigator flying missions over Germany. Describing his own generation of 70- to 80-year-old men, he notes: ""A lot of us went through a lot of stuff that we've been unable to talk about."" Once uncorked, Rochlin's stories flowed blunt, irreverent and coarse--hardly the expected misty-eyed history. Most dramatic, he tells of being shot down over Yugoslavia, being rescued while injured by a female partisan and walking to Italy only at night over several weeks. Along the way, he is forced to execute three Germans (""Jesus Christ, I didn't want to shoot anybody"") and coerced into having sex by his syphilis-bearing companion, who has asked him to ""make fig-fig."" The audio book offers an unusual sense of unembellished exuberance expressed through the author's conscious act of performance. Based on the 1999 HarperCollins hardcover. (Oct.)