Vietnamerica is a visually stunning portrait of survival, escape, and reinvention—and of the gift of the American immigrants’ dream, passed on to their children. Monkey Bridge charts the unmapped territory of the Vietnamese American experience in the aftermath of war. Heart-wrenching, fragmented, raw, former North Vietnamese solder Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War provides a strikingly honest look at how the Vietnam War forever changed his life, his country, and the people who live there. A collection of linked short stories about a platoon of American soldiers fighting on the ground in the Vietnam War. His third book about the war, it is based upon his experiences as a soldier in the 23rd Infantry Division. Truong Nhu Tang met Ho Chi Minh. Later he fought in the Vietnamese jungle and emerged as one of the major figures in the “fight for liberation”—and one of the most determined adversaries of the United States. He became the Vietcong’s Minister of Justice, but at the end of the war he fled the country in disillusionment and despair. He now lives in exile in Paris, the highest level official to have defected from Vietnam to the West. This is his candid, revealing and unforgettable autobiography. Written twenty years after the end of the Vietnam War, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s controversial memoir answers the lingering questions that surround this disastrous episode in American history. An epic story of wasted opportunities and deadly miscalculations, Embers of War delves deep into the historical record to provide hard answers to the unanswered questions surrounding the demise of one Western power in Vietnam and the arrival of another.
The Vietnam War
The Vietnam War remains a searing chapter in our national story, and the social conflicts the war sparked continue to blaze. What was the cost of not examining the war more thoroughly or cogently, what are scholars saying about it now, and what can we gain from discussing it today? Read the memoirs, journalism, and fiction of the era in this timely discussion series.
Vietnamerica
Monkey Bridge
The Sorrow of War
The Things They Carried
A Vietcong Memoir
In Retrospect
Embers of War
