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Pursuit of Glory is a Men’s Adventure / War novel by John Hansen.
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“[A] beautifully written novel that depicts the true conflict men and women feel when they are serving our country, protecting us while they are breaking inside. Heartfelt and brilliantly written.”
– Rabia Tanveer for Reader’s Favorite
Jack Keller had never in his entire life been farther than fifty miles from the small mining town of Gilmore, Idaho. For twenty-one years it was all that he had known. But now the Spaniards have sunk the USS Maine in Havana Harbor and America is going to get even. Teddy Roosevelt is looking for volunteers – Rough Riders they are called. Jack’s mundane life of hauling ore with his father pales in comparison to the promise of adventure–a temptation that he can’t resist.
But, as he soon finds out, it is a decision with consequences he’d never even imagined. Then again, young men in search of glory don’t always think straight.
A Word from the Author
Throughout my life, I have always had a fascination with war and the military. Nonetheless, I have generally embraced this passion with a healthy dose of reality that has grown as I have aged. In writing Pursuit of Glory I have attempted to illustrate the consequences of one young man’s decision to go in harm’s way. My intent was to make it as realistic as possible. I wanted the reader to feel as if they were right there with my characters whether it be in an Idaho bar or the jungles of Cuba. And so I have created Jack Keller, a young man who has never known life beyond the small Idaho mining town of Gilmore. Jack is twenty-one and bored with his life. He decides in an impetuous moment that joining Teddy Roosevelt’s Roughriders, against his father’s wishes, is the way to rectify that situation. He has no metric by which to measure what life in the Army or war for that matter could possibly be like. It is just human nature, I think, to want to believe that something good will come of one’s decisions. It is this dilemma that exists within young men wanting to find themselves, to prove their selves to see if they measure up as a man that causes them to voluntarily put themselves in the quandary that Jack finds himself. In my research for this book, I found that the Army was far from being infallible. It was no doubt like any other large organization trying to move thousands of men and their equipment to a foreign, disease infested land to fight a well dug in enemy –things didn’t always go as planned. It is within this milieu of conflict and inequity that Jack Keller must not only find his self but he has to make things right with his father. I believe the reader will find Pursuit of Glory vividly realistic in its depiction of the Army, the Spanish-American war and life in an 1898 Idaho mining town. I hope you enjoy.
(John Hansen, May 2017)
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