Flavorwire: Michael Herr, the writer famous for authoring the gritty Vietnam War testimonial Dispatches, has died at 76, after a long bout with illness according to Knopf, his former publisher.
Dispatches is not the best book I have read about the war in Viet Nam; for me, that's Bernard Fall's Last Papers on the War (his Hell in a Very Small Place--about the fall of Dien Bien Phu in 1956 (?) convinced me that the war was hopeless). But Dispatches made the human cost of the war incredibly clear, and is a great book.
(Fiction: The Quiet American is probably as good as it gets. Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie is brilliant and extraordinarily unsettling. David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest is the best thing he ever did. Frances Fitzgerald's The Fire in the Lake is also magnificent...there have been many extraordinary books written about that debacle...)
3 comments:
Recently re-read Dispatches, an amazing book.
John Duke
I agree. Great book.
Dispatches is not the best book I have read about the war in Viet Nam; for me, that's Bernard Fall's Last Papers on the War (his Hell in a Very Small Place--about the fall of Dien Bien Phu in 1956 (?) convinced me that the war was hopeless). But Dispatches made the human cost of the war incredibly clear, and is a great book.
(Fiction: The Quiet American is probably as good as it gets. Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie is brilliant and extraordinarily unsettling. David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest is the best thing he ever did. Frances Fitzgerald's The Fire in the Lake is also magnificent...there have been many extraordinary books written about that debacle...)
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