“Set amid the twin infernos of Cambodia and Vietnam in the early 1970’s, The Lotus Eaters draws the reader into a haunting world of war, betrayal, courage, obsession, and love. Tatjana Soli’s spare, lucid prose infuses this novel with a dramatic clarity that makes us eyewitnesses to the collapse of two civilizations. More than that, The Lotus Eaters helps us to see and hear and feel the terrible human costs of that conflagration.”
—TIM O’BRIEN, NATIONAL BOOK AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF THE THINGS THEY CARRIED
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“Set amid the twin infernos of Cambodia and Vietnam in the early 1970’s, The Lotus Eaters draws the reader into a haunting world of war, betrayal, courage, obsession, and love. Tatjana Soli’s spare, lucid prose infuses this novel with a dramatic clarity that makes us eyewitnesses to the collapse of two civilizations. More than that, The Lotus Eaters helps us to see and hear and feel the terrible human costs of that conflagration.”
—TIM O’BRIEN, NATIONAL BOOK AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF THE THINGS THEY CARRIED
A unique and sweeping debut novel of an American female combat photographer in the Vietnam War, as she captures the wrenching chaos and finds herself torn between the love of two men. On a stifling day in 1975, the North Vietnamese army is poised to roll into Saigon. As the fall of the city begins, two lovers make their way through the streets to escape to a new life. Helen Adams, an American photojournalist, must take leave of a war she is addicted to and a devastated country she has come to love. Linh, the Vietnamese man who loves her, must grapple with his own conflicted loyalties of heart and homeland. As they race to leave, they play out a drama of devotion and betrayal that spins them back through twelve war-torn years, beginning in the splendor of Angkor Wat, with their mentor, larger-than-life war correspondent Sam Darrow, once Helen’s infuriating love and fiercest competitor, and Linh’s secret keeper, boss and truest friend. Tatjana Soli paints a searing portrait of an American woman’s struggle and triumph in Vietnam, a stirring canvas contrasting the wrenching horror of war and the treacherous narcotic of obsession with the redemptive power of love. Readers will be transfixed by this stunning novel of passion, duty and ambition among the ruins of war.
Praise
New York Times Review
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
by Janet Maslin
Published March 28, 2010
A version of this article appeared in print on March 29, 2010, on page C4 of the New York edition.
“Haunting debut…tough and lyrical…novel begins where it ought to end. In this quietly mesmerizing book about journalists covering the war in Vietnam, the first glimpses of the place are the most familiar. The year is 1975. Americans are in a state of panic as North Vietnamese forces prepare to occupy Saigon. The looters, the desperate efforts to escape this war zone, the mobs surrounding the United States Embassy, the overcrowded helicopters struggling to rise above the chaos: these images seem to introduce Ms. Soli’s readers to a story they already know…
“The Lotus Eaters” dramatic impact even when its characters become hardened and battle-weary.
Ms. Soli has done prodigious research about the Vietnam War, particularly about the role of female war photographers, and so is able to imbue an otherwise deeply romantic book with a strong sense of history. She artfully uses Helen’s autodidactic approach to photography as a way of raising questions that her readers need to answer too. What is a war photographer’s mission? The book suggests that the job involves developing both a discerning eye (Sam is said to have birdlike movements, as if they allow him to look at things from many angles at once) and an analytic understanding of what the camera records.
Helen’s experience peaks when she has mastered these aspects of the job. It becomes irrevocably altered when she senses the vulturelike attitude of journalists who flock to the site of a lost war for reasons of naked professional ambition. By the end of the story — in ways that bring to mind the feverishness of the Iraqi war film “The Hurt Locker,” with its very different locations, job descriptions and wartime imperatives — she has been utterly transformed. She is no longer a witness to history. As Ms. Soli makes her readers understand very viscerally, Helen has become part of the history that she set out to record.
Read the entire review
New York Times Sunday Book Review
by Danielle Trussoni
April 4, 2010
It is April 1975. The North Vietnamese are marching into Saigon, the Americans are fleeing in helicopters. And in Tatjana Soli’s splendid first novel, “The Lotus Eaters,” a group of Western journalists sip “liberated” Champagne on the roof of the Caravelle Hotel as they reflect on all that has been lost. For Helen, a veteran photographer who made her name covering the war, the resounding absence of planes and artillery has transformed Saigon into an eerie place of “nostalgia and history and failure.” Failed dreams and failed ambitions may be the very stuff from which Vietnam narratives are fashioned; but although Helen’s war is over, there is no guarantee she will be on a plane home. As one of her colleagues says ominously, “The war doesn’t ever have to end for us.” For the interpreters of violence there will always be another war zone with new treasures of heartbreaking stories.
Read the entire review
Washington Post
by Masha Hamilton
April 3, 2010
Though the novel explores war primarily from the journalists’ viewpoint, the secondary characters are generously drawn. In Soli’s hands, edgy, frightened soldiers and hardened commanders rise above stock characters. But Helen is at the heart of this story as she, like many journalists, pays a dear personal price for covering violence. The Vietnam conflict has receded into the history books, but “The Lotus Eaters” feels pulled from today’s headlines, full of meaning for readers whose country is once again sending men and women to the battlefields, both to fight and to document that fighting.
Read the entire review
The Times UK
by David Hayles
July 24, 2010
(excerpt)
Don’t be put off by the wistful book jacket design and the cover come-on that sounds like a bad Angelina Jolie film waiting to happen: “In a once beautiful land now a warzone, three people are thrown together by love and conflict, intrigue and chaos.” This is, in fact, a thoughtful and often gruelling account of the lives of Helen Adams, one of the first female photographers in the war (inspired by the real-life photographers Dickey Chapelle and Catherine Leroy), and Sam Darrow, a Pulitzer prize-winning war junkie with whom she falls in love.
Love is the last thing they need, when, all the while witnessing carnage and cruelty, they are trying to convince themselves that they are more than ghoulish voyeurs in a pointless war. Austrian-born Soli might not have experienced the war first-hand like Marlantes (instead she lists an extensive bibliography), but she does one hell of a job of putting the reader knee-deep in the action, and performs the commendable literary feat of blending the burgeoning love story—first between Helen and Sam, then, later, between Helen and Lingh (the conflicted Vietnamese who works for the US troops), with a keen appraisal of what lies next for those attempting to return to normality after the war—as well as the impact of the war on the Vietnamese themselves.
Soli throws in moments that shock—including a soldier killing himself in front of a platoon and an horrific, pulse-racing late novel detour into the killing fields of Cambodia. She is also a dab hand at startlingly evocative imagery: when a helicopter crashes, the last thing one of the occupants sees is “Every shade of green in the world”. Soli, it would seem, could write furiously well about anything.
People—(3 1/2 stars)
”The novel is steeped in history, yet gorgeous sensory details enliven the prose . . . . 35 years after the fall of Saigon, Soli’s entrancing debut brings you close enough to feel a part of it.”
More Magazine
by Ellen Emry Heltzel
July/ August 2010
In this superb novel, American photojournalist Helen Adams is drawn to the turmoil of the Vietnam War, which cost her brother his life. While her lens soon makes her as famous as her pictures, Helen survives by taking cues from the jungle-savvy colleagues who are her paramours. But she must learn for herself the real trick of her trade: how to find truth amid the fog of war.
Boston Globe
by Carmela Ciuraru
March 30, 2010
A Woman in a War, Amid the Damage
The author explores Helen’s psyche with startling clarity, and portrays the chaotic war raging around her with great attention to seemingly minor details. The real heartbreak in “The Lotus Eaters’’ is found in subtle, unexpected moments: “I’m hoping you are strong,’’ Linh tells Helen soon after meeting her. “I am thinking this is going to be a very long war.’’
Read the entire review
The Independent
The Lotus Eaters, by Tatjana Soli
Reviewed by David Evans
January 23, 2011
Moral Ambiguity brought into Sharper Focus
Tatjana Soli’s debut novel begins amid the chaos of the US withdrawal from Saigon in 1975.
Helen, a photojournalist, and Linh, her injured lover, battle through the crowds to board an evacuation helicopter. But then Helen jumps out, desperate for a few final photographs, and leaves Linh to escape alone. It is a masterful opening, with a strikingly cinematic style: fitting for a book that examines how the camera lens refracts reality. As Helen becomes inured to the horrors of conflict, Soli explores the moral ambiguity of war photography: her bold and haunting novel evokes the ghoulishness of the profession and the peculiar detachment it requires.
Historical Novel Society
Helen Adams is an American photojournalist in love with South Vietnam because it is so “unlovable” during its transition in 1975. The sense of impending doom is everywhere. In those critical weeks, thousands of American military are abandoning Saigon and its beautiful, outlying villages to Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese leader who will soon rule all of Vietnam.
Will one more photo really matter? To Helen, they all matter—or none matters. Her desire to be the perfect wartime photojournalist/correspondent is almost inexplicable. Meanwhile, in the process of entering this brutal environment and taking photos of the most horrific scenes imaginable, she falls in love with two entirely different men.
The intertwining themes of love of this beautiful, exotic country and how personal love arises are focal to the plot and character here. Is the brutality and destruction of war or the indomitable spirits forged by the war the transforming element? Does love enable Helen, Darrow, and Linh to keep doing their vital jobs, jobs that the Americans have lost faith in? Do the deaths of their beloved friends make them love Vietnam more and instill in them a desire to remain after the American withdrawal? And just when is it more than okay to be a traitor to save one’s country from total oblivion?
The Lotus Eaters is one of the most honest, endearing, searing, and intriguing stories about the Vietnam War that I have ever read and as far as I’m concerned, one of the finest novels of the Vietnam era. It goes so much deeper and wider than a typical “war is hell” story. Tatjana Soli has caught the essence of this devastating conflict and the loves that ensue during and after the destruction it wrought. Highly recommended. —Viviane Crystal
Kirkus Starred Review
THE LOTUS EATERS
An impressive debut novel about a female photographer covering the Vietnam War.
Helen Adams is an experienced photojournalist with ten years in Vietnam on her résumé. The cinematic opening chapter shows her at the center of the chaotic, violent, desperate streets of Saigon in 1975, on the cusp of the communist takeover, as Vietnamese and Americans race to escape. The narrative then flashes back to a decade earlier, when Helen arrives in bustling Saigon as a young, naïve photographer so anxious not to “miss out” on the war that she has dropped out of college to travel there. Making up in grit what she lacks in experience, she secures photography work, scrappily clawing her way up from tamer lifestyle pieces to covering field missions and combat. She is taken in by a fellow ex-pat named Darrow, a photographer whose obsession with the war and the power his camera gives him to capture it dominates his every move. They enter into a tumultuous, passionate love affair as the war worsens. Though she fears becoming as reckless and singly motivated as Darrow, Helen transitions into a seasoned war photographer, battling her emotions about the inhumanity of war with her professional purpose. She also takes on a unique challenge as one of the few working female ex-pats in Vietnam. In tandem with the two Americans but undeniably distinct from them, Linh, Darrow’s enigmatic Vietnamese assistant, steadfastly walks the difficult line between patriot and traitor, and the three form a friendship out of their harrowing situation. When tragedy strikes, Linh and Helen are thrown together and eventually find their friendship developing into love. This is a visceral story about the powerful and complex bonds that war creates. It raises profound questions about professional and personal lives that are based on, and often dependent on, a nation’s horrific strife. Graphic but never gratuitous, the gripping, haunting narrative explores the complexity of violence, foreignness, even betrayal.
Moving and memorable.
Starred Library Journal
Seen through the lens of young American freelance photographer Helen Adams, this evocative debut novel is a well researched exploration of Vietnam between 1963 and 1975, when the United States pulled out of the conflict. Helen, who has come to Vietnam partly to discover what really happened to her brother, is determined to see the real Vietnam, combat and all. The narrative focuses on Adams, Pulitzer Prize-winning combat photojournalist Sam Darrow, and his Vietnamese assistant, Linh, revealing their relationships, loyalties, and ambitions and the terrible toll the war takes on them all. As readers, we come to understand the characters’ attraction to and ambivalence about the war, how love can survive and thrive under such extreme conditions (Helen and Linh have an affair), the courage needed to report under war conditions and the journalistic principles involved, and the fragile beauty of this war-torn country and its people. VERDICT: Like Marianne Wiggins’s Eveless Eden and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried before it, Soli’s poignant work will grab the attention of most readers. A powerful new writer to watch. [See Prepub Alert, LJ]
—Gwen Vredevoogd, Marymount Univ., Arlington, VA
“If you have wondered what it’s like to be a combat photographer and what kind of toll such brutal work exacts on the soul, you must read The Lotus Eaters, Tatjana Soli’s beautiful and harrowing new novel. Its characters are unforgettable, as real as the historical events in which they’re enmeshed.”
—Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls, Bridge of Sighs and That Old Cape Magic
“Set amid the twin infernos of Cambodia and Vietnam in the early 1970’s, The Lotus Eaters draws the reader into a haunting world of war, betrayal, courage, obsession, and love. Tatjana Soli’s spare, lucid prose infuses this novel with a dramatic clarity that makes us eyewitnesses to the collapse of two civilizations. More than that, The Lotus Eaters helps us to see and hear and feel the terrible human costs of that conflagration.”
—Tim O’Brien, National Book Award-winning author of The Things They Carried
“… a vivid and memorable evocation of wartime Vietnam and the sort of people who lived out the darkness of the war. Foreign and Vietnamese, these people were of a time and place almost lost to history yet never to be forgotten. This is the kind of novel that brings it all back. Tatjana Soli is a perceptive and talented writer. I was most impressed by The Lotus Eaters and enjoyed it from start to finish. ”
—Robert Stone, author of National Award-winning Dog Soldiers and NBA Finalist Damascus Gate.
“The very steam from Vietnam’s jungles seems to rise from the pages of Tatjana Soli’s tremendously evocative debut, a love story set in the hallucinatory atmosphere of war, described in translucent, fever-dream prose. ”
—Janice Y. K. Lee, author of The Piano Teacher
“The Lotus Eaters is a mesmerizing novel. Tatjana Soli takes on a monumental task by re-examining a heavily chronicled time and painting it with a lovely, fresh palette. The book is a true gift from a promising new writer.”
—Katie Crouch, author of Girls in Trucks and Men and Dogs
“Beautiful and harrowing, The Lotus Eaters explores the world of war, themes of love and loss, and the complicated question of what drives us toward the heroic with remarkable compassion and grace. Tatjana Soli’s exquisite first novel is among the best I’ve read in years.”
—Meg Waite Clayton, author of The Wednesday Sisters
“A haunting story of the powers of love and war, the demands of history and desire, and the unforgettable people who seek, against overwhelming odds, a kind of redemption. A great read from a writer to watch.”
—Janet Peery, National Book Award Finalist for River Beyond the World
Q & A
CAN YOU TALK A LITTLE ABOUT THE TITLE, THE LOTUS EATERS, IN RELATION TO THE SUBJECT OF THE BOOK?
When I first found my entry into the subject of the Vietnam war, a picture of the female photojournalist, Dickey Chapelle, I began to read about not only her life but of war correspondents in all the wars. I read about the phenomena of being addicted to the excitement, the thrill of war, which to outsiders seems pretty unimaginable. After a while, some of them are unable to break away and staying becomes a kind of death wish. Even if they go home, they are unable to return to normal life. They get obsessed by the high that is war, the sense of urgency and purpose it gives them.
But I also think the book is about transformation. Being transformed by the war. On an individual level, I don’t believe the solution to the problems of the world is staying insulated from them. All of the characters in the book take big risks, but the biggest risk is staying connected to another human being, risking one’s heart.
WHAT ARE YOUR OBSESSIONS?
(Laughs.) You’re right. Writers, especially novelists, are almost required to have obsessions, the kind that last you for years and years, through a whole book, or a whole body of work for that matter. I suppose one of my main preoccupations is about how to live in a fallen world. In this particular instance, a fascination, a fear, of violence. As a human being you want to work out the formula for how to confront it, how to be brave when faced with it, how to survive it. Another obsession, linked to it especially in terms of war, is dislocation. The emigrant experience of nostalgia and longing. So many of us now are far from home, and many will never be going back. Does that change the definition of belonging?
WHAT WAS THE ATTRACTION FOR YOU IN WRITING ABOUT WAR? PARTS OF THE BOOK ARE PRETTY DARK. WHERE DOES IT ALL COME FROM?
You sound like my mother. (Laughs.) I’m not a gloomy person. Really. When I’ve had a hard day, I like to pop in a romantic-comedy video like anyone else. Easy, non-threatening. But in books, I want more than just entertainment. I really believe that if you read the right book at the right time in your life, it will transform you. So going back to the obsessions, I’m drawn to writing about the difficult, the frightening. What do people cling to in a fallen world? The things that keep us up in the middle of the night.
And then there is a wonderful quote by Joyce Carol Oates when she was asked why she found violence so alluring as a literary subject: If you’re going to spend the next year of your life writing, you would probably rather write “Moby Dick” than a little household mystery with cat detectives. I consider tragedy the highest form of art. Enough said!
WHAT ARE THE BOOKS THAT “TRANSFORMED” YOU?
Over the years, several. The first, the most powerful, was in college: The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. That book made me permanently on the side of the underdog. I never saw the world in the same way afterwards.
WHY SPECIFICALLY WERE YOU DRAWN TO THE VIETNAM WAR?
I think Vietnam is still a war that we can’t get to the end of. Our first great disillusionment as a nation. But also, unlike now, journalists had complete access, which is probably why we ultimately got the real story from there. Not all, but some of the journalists who went there were very young, totally untrained. They went with a kind of naiveté, a kind of romanticism that isn’t as possible today. The Graham Greene, Far East mystique.
WHY A WOMAN AS THE MAIN CHARACTER IN A WAR NOVEL?
I wanted to write a grand adventure for a female character. Vietnam was just the beginning of regular female war correspondents. Very few then, even fewer in WWII. I didn’t want to substitute a woman in a man’s role—turn her into a GI Jane. Because a woman was naturally an outsider in that war, she will see things that might be otherwise overlooked.
I recently read Flannery O’Connor quoted as saying that her work was about “the action of grace in territory once held by the devil.” If there is any grace to be found in war, it’s only in individual acts of kindness, only in the love of one human being for another. That’s all that preserves our humanity and culture to survive the aftermath. Otherwise war truly does destroy us. I think a female character naturally brings this aspect to the foreground.
THE MAIN CHARACTER, HELEN, IS A PHOTOJOURNALIST. DO YOU DO PHOTOGRAPHY?
That’s actually a funny question because I hate taking pictures, especially on vacations, although I admit I cherish them afterwards. What bothers me about pictures is the self-consciousness it brings. It takes away from the direct experience. The paradox is that it actually provides a barrier of imagined safety to many war correspondents. Because of my own aversion to taking pictures, I already had Helen using the camera as a sort of shield between herself and the reality of what was happening before her. I’ve since read interviews where photojournalists are astonished afterwards by the risks they took to get a picture, hardly remembering taking them.
WHO IS YOUR FAVORITE CHARACTER?
As in, who do I feel closest to? Linh. I know that seems strange, since he’s the one furthest from my real life experience, but I understand his torn heart. I admire someone who is overcome by hardship and returns it with love.
HOW LONG DID IT TAKE TO WRITE THE LOTUS EATERS?
Ten years from the first idea to holding the book in my hand. But during that time I also wrote and published many short stories, started two other novels, earned my MFA, taught. I felt bad about this until I read a wonderful essay by Christina Thompson called, “How to Write a Book in Ten Easy … Years.” As with the writers mentioned in the essay, I was riddled by false starts and doubling plots that threatened to turn into two (!) separate novels. I’m a slow bloomer.
AS SOMEONE WHO HAS PUBLISHED SHORT STORIES BEFORE PUBLISHING A NOVEL, WHAT DO YOU FIND ARE THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE TWO FORMS?
It took me a while to realize that a novel isn’t just a long short story. They are entirely different animals, and it’s not a given that a writer will excel equally in both forms. It’s a different personality type almost. Short stories are more like poetry—intense, lyrical, super-saturated moments full of meaning. You can take more risks. Novels derive their power from the architecture of plot, the accumulation of images, the progression of time. I think the novel, more than any other art form, mirrors the experience of being alive.
WILL YOU CONTINUE TO WRITE SHORT STORIES?
Absolutely. I love the form and many ideas, experiments one thinks up, don’t call for the breadth of a novel. Writing novels is lonely work, so I like to always be working on some short stories, sending them out into the world and getting feedback.
CAN YOU TALK ABOUT SOME OF YOUR LITERARY INFLUENCES?
There are the classics that I return to regularly: Tolstoy, Hemingway, Conrad, Graham Greene, Jean Rhys. All genius storytellers above everything else so that you can reread their works and never tire of them.
Then the canon of contemporary authors, individual books I’m in awe of: Marilynne Robinson’sHousekeeping, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers and Bear & His Daughter, Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, Joy William’sBreaking & Entering.
WHAT ARE YOU CURRENTLY READING?
I binge read all the work of one author when I discover them. Right now I’m reading V. S. Naipaul and Jean Thompson. And I’m looking forward to the new Pamuk novel, Museum of Innocence.
ASIDE FROM WRITING, WHAT IS ONE TALENT YOU WISH YOU HAD?
(Laughs.) I love opera. If I had Kiri Te Kanawa’s voice, there would be worse ways to spend one’s life than singing.
WHAT ARE YOU WORKING ON NOW?
I’m turning a rather long and hefty short story into a novel. A very interesting process. Knock on wood that this one doesn’t take another ten years.
Behind the Scenes
~ THE BIG ADVENTURE ~
If there’s a book you really want to read,
but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.
—TONI MORRISON
I’ve been haunted by the Vietnam war since I was a small girl, living for a brief time at Fort Ord, in Monterey, California. Although I didn’t understand what was going on at the time, it became a mysterious force that shaped the adults around me. As I grew up, I read all about the war I could get my hands on, both fiction and non-fiction.
In college, my favorite writing professor, in talking about what to write (all beginning writers panic at the thought of no material), said you should write what you would most like to read, and haven’t found. I lived in the books of Conrad, Hemingway, and Graham Greene, and I hated that all the big adventures in life starred marvelously complicated main characters who were all men. Why do women have to be defined only by their relationships as girlfriends, wives, mothers? Why in bigger narratives do they so often fall into the role of passive spectator or victim? Why can’t they go out into the world to test themselves? Have serious flaws, fail, live in the bigger moral universe?
Years later, I was looking through a marvelous book honoring the photojournalists killed in Vietnam and Indochina, Requiem: The Vietnam Collection, edited by Tim Page and Horst Faas. One particular picture stopped me—a picture of the photographer Dickey Chapelle, who was one of the first female war correspondents in Vietnam. That picture set a fire in me as I had never read or heard of women journalists in the war. Turns out there were only two or three women photographers who spent extensive time there. Katherine Leroy was another one. And during my preparation for publication I became aware of a third, Barbara Gluck. Although obviously a woman working there in any capacity—nurse or volunteer in the numerous charity organizations—was tremendously brave, a journalist’s perspective was the necessary lens I needed to be able to write about the things I was interested about in the war. I found my subject.
Recommended Reading
Although I’ve included a bibliography of the books I read for research writing The Lotus Eaters, here is a more general list of books on Vietnam and the war. I’ve included some “musts” but also some more eclectic, lesser known works.
1) The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien. If you want the single most important fictional book on the soldier’s experience in Vietnam, you will not do better than this book. Read it once and then read it again and again because it will reach you everything about Vietnam, the war, solders, writing, and “the human heart in conflict with itself.” It is filled with pain and compassion and unbearable beauty.
2) Going After Cacciato, In the Lake of the Woods, and If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, by Tim O’Brien. If you are hooked on O’Brien from the above, as you should be, then continue on with this crash course into the war. In his memoir, If I Die…, O’Brien explains his idea of story truth versus real truth: “Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.” Going After Cacciato is a complex novel about the human imagination in the face of the brutality of war. In the Lake of the Woods is a novel not overtly about the war, but rather it repercussions, its mysteries, the impossibility of there being one final truth to any story. There is an image of the main character pouring boiling water over houseplants that is as eerie and violent as any I’ve come across.
3) Dog Soldiers, by Robert Stone. The war provides a perfect catalyst to the archetypal flawed, dark Stone character in this novel. It is about characters making the wrong decisions and events larger than themselves taking over. Stone is a master of mixing the personal and the political, and his prose is a thing of beauty.
4) Dispatches, by Michael Herr. This is a wonderful collection of articles written for Esquire by the journalist Herr. Besides his empathy for the soldier’s experience, his insight in to the counterculture, what distinguishes this collection from other accounts is his understanding for the paradoxical high that many of the journalists experienced during their time covering the war. This quote captures it perfectly: “Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.”
5) Requiem, by Horst Faas and Tim Page. This is a book of photography taken in Vietnam and Indochina by photographers who were killed in the conflict. Many of the pictures are the iconic ones we all know, others are little known, including ones from Vietnamese and Cambodian photographers. This was the book where I first discovered the picture of Dickey Chapelle. Amazing production values, a real piece of history.
6) The Sacred Willow, by Duong Van Mai Elliott. This is a compelling family saga of four generations of a Vietnamese family that brings out the complexity of how the Vietnamese felt about “the American war.” Avoids the political and focuses on the human.
7) Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An, by Larry Berman. Although I knew from research that An was a Time correspondent, friend of almost every significant American journalist in Vietnam, and, after the war, was revealed to be a spy for the Communists, this book came out only a few years ago and was unavailable to me. I read it a few months ago and was fascinated by the previously unknown details.
8) Fire in the Lake, by Frances Fitzgerald. One of the most balanced, comprehensive studies on the war in that it explores the history of Vietnam, the culture, colonialism, and then American involvement. Essential reading.
9) Sensing the Enemy and After Sorrow, by Lady Borton. These are memoirs by a remarkable woman, one of the few Americans to work both in South and North Vietnam during the war. Borton, a Quaker, worked in a refugee camp for the boat people and escorted the first journalists to the scene of the massacre at My Lai. A rare insight.
10) An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems, by Huynh Sanh Thong. Because there is no better way to understand a people than through their art.