The Last Detail: A Novel - Softcover

"One of the ten best novels of the year." Philadelphia Inquirer "Salty, bawdy, hilarious, and very touching." Variety "Honest, heart-wrenching . . . Keeps his serio-comic escapade snowballing until the very end." The New York Times "The writing is superb, the pace headlong, the irony tempered with curious gentleness." Cosmopolitan "A lean, funny, bitter book." Boston Globe "Will make servicemen say: 'sure, that's the way it is." Newsday "First novels tend to be flawed some place, but Darryl Ponicsan's is the exception." Sacramento Bee "An accomplished writer with a sure storyteller's touch." St. Louis Post Dispatch "[A] gem of a first novel . . . Fast-paced . . . [the] dialogue is often hilarious." Fort Worth Star "A well-spun yarn that runs the gamut of emotions in anything but an ordinary story." Fresno Bee "So deeply human that the reader is apt to believe . . . that he is actually witnessing the events." San Raphael Independence Journal "Ponicsan in his first appearance proves himself not only a master but a model of dialogue." San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle "[An] excellent first novel . . . Wonderful dialogue." Publishers Weekly "The characters are uneducated, tough, uncultured career sailors, but their warmth and affection come through, and readers become really involved with them the innocent victims . . . of a heartless society. This book is sure to be a success." Library Journal

To be published simultaneously with the hardcover of its sequel, Last Flag Flying, in conjunction with the movie of that book, directed by Richard and starring Bryan Cranston, Steve Carell, and Laurence Fishburne, to be released in fall 2017. The acclaimed cult novel that one critic called "the first underground of the 70s," and that was the basis for the now classic movie by Hal Ashby (screenplay by Robert Towne) starring Jack Nicholson that critics raved with Vincent Canby calling it "a new kind of anti-comedy." A profane, bawdy, honest, and explosively funny novel with an antiwar, anti-authoritarian, anti-bureaucratic double speak message that is still relevant. With a new foreword by the author The author self-published an edition at The Wright Press in 2005 and licensed a collected edition at the Stairway Press that is now off the market