What I Learned At Bastogne

IN THIS PREQUEL TO HIS 1970'S COMING-OF-AGE NOVEL set in Yazoo City, Mississippi, Dale Beasley tells the story of the devilish and charming Dallas Crabtree who saw his well-laid plans waylaid, ambushed for a greater call. One phone call took the college senior away from his carefree life of fraternity parties and sorority formals to being surrounded by the German army in the Siege of Bastogne. That one call caused Crabtree to spend a year of his life in the war and the rest of his life coming home.

What I Learned At Bastogne, set before and during World War II, is the prequel to What I Learned At The 'Zoo, his coming-of-age novel set in Yazoo City, Mississippi. That first book rollicks the reader into the turbulent 1970s and results from Beasley's thought for one short time that he hailed from Texas. His father, the late Brigadier General Glenn D. Beasley, Sr., United States Army, knew and determined that his son would also know, instead, that the youngster's roots ran deep from the soil of the Mississippi Delta. The 'Zoo book reveals the younger Beasley's fictionalized account of his fourteenth summer in Yazoo City—a summer that features an outlandish family, a plot to smuggle Cold War secrets from Mississippi to spies in East Germany, and the forging of a lasting bond between the boy and his Great Uncle Dallas Crabtree. Eccentric, bizarre, complicated, and ever-entertaining family members and their friends welcome readers into the Crabtree world, now in the time before ...

Mississippi best-selling author of What I Learned At the 'Zoo and also of the full-color coffee table We Will Not Be Home By Christmas. Lieutenant Colonel (R) Beasley is an Iraq war veteran with more than 30 years of military service. An emergency/trauma nurse, he and his family live in Gluckstadt, Mississippi.