Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides Book

Christian Appy?s Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides is an oral history that serves as a "final public record" from many who have struggled publicly with the war for 20 or 30 years. The book is also a monumental effort to capture voices long unheard and ensure that the words are not lost to a new generation. He includes statements from significant political and military figures from both sides of the conflict, including William Westmoreland, Alexander Haig, Nikita Kruschev's son Sergei, and Vice President Nguyen Thi Bihn. But he tempers these with the voices of a World Airways stewardess who accompanied troops out of the war zone, of the widow of the immolated Norman Morrison, and of numerous Vietnamese and American non-combatants whose lives were torn by the conflagration. These tales, and the contributions from poets, writers, and activists transform the book into a epic dialogue. Indeed, Appy says that he chose the title Patriots not out of a presumed understanding of how that word should be defined, but rather because it served as a locus for so many of the inner struggles of his interviewees: "In what ways might patriotism be a force for good or inspire noble sacrifice, and when does it become a club for stifling dissent and a rallying cry for unjustifiable destruction." Patriots is a book that will reawaken memories--horrific and jubilant--for those who lived through the troubled 1960s and 1970s; and for those just coming to understand the war, it will make vivid the trials of a different time and place. This is a lasting, powerful book that's essential reading for students of the Vietnam conflict. --Patrick O?KelleyRead More

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  • Product Description

    A quarter century has passed since the last American helicopter flew off the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, and only now have we attained the perspective and access to make a book like Patriots possible. In this monumental oral history, Christian G. Appy has created the first work to probe the war's path through both the United States and Vietnam. Intellectually illuminating and emotionally overwhelming, Patriots allows us to see and feel what this war really meant to people on all sides-Americans and Vietnamese, generals and grunts, policy makers and protesters, guerrillas and CIA operatives, pilots and doctors, artists and journalists, and a variety of ordinary citizens whose lives were swept up in a cataclysm that killed three million people.

    The vivid accounts of 135 men and women span the entire history of the Vietnam conflict from its murky origins in the 1940s to the chaotic fall of Saigon in 1975. Their memories take us from deafening jungle firefights to Oval Office policy debates, from the underground tunnels of Cu Chi to Kent State, from press briefings in Saigon to dogfights in the skies over North Vietnam, from POW tiger cages to the Paris peace talks. Their voices, along with Appy's running text, make clear why this war generated some of the most bitterly divisive moral and political debates of the twentieth century.

    Reflecting the experiences and passions of all who were touched by the war, Patriots will stand with the most important and influential books on the Vietnam era.

  • 067003214X
  • 9780670032143
  • Christian G. Appy
  • 1 May 2003
  • Viking Books
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 608
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