It is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert and into a war where the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. Along the way, she investigates the questions we must inevitably answer. Tree of Smoke is the story of William 'Skip' Sands, CIA-engaged in Pschological Operations against the Vietcong-and the disasters that befall him. In this intelligent, accomplished work of narrative journalism, Elizabeth Royte does for water what Michael Pollan did for food: she finds the people, machines, economies, and cultural trends that bring it from distant aquifers to our supermarkets.
Only now, with the water industry trading in the billions of dollars, have we begun to question what it is we're drinking. The brands have become so ubiquitous that we're hardly conscious that Poland Spring and Evian were once real springs, bubbling in remote corners of Maine and France. In 2006, the book was cited in a Times poll as among the important works of fiction of the previous 25 years.Second only to soda, bottled water is on the verge of becoming the most popular beverage in the country. The book was adapted into a 1999 film of the same name, starring Billy Crudup. "It is a place where attempts at salvation remain radically provisional, and where a teetering narrative architecture uncannily expresses both Christlike and pathological traits of mind." Johnson's is a universe governed by addiction, malevolence, faith and uncertainty," James McManus wrote in the Times in 1992. But, as related by a narrator with an unprintable name (his initials were F.H.), the book also had an underlying sympathy and sense of possibility. The title was taken from the Velvet Underground song "Heroin" and the stories were sometimes likened to William Burroughs' "Naked Lunch." Much of "Jesus' Son" tells of crime, violence and substance abuse.
But many remember him for "Jesus' Son," which in hazed but undeniable detail chronicled the lives of various drug addicts adrift in America.
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