Authoritative, insightful, and controversial, urgently speaking to our role in the world today,American Reckoninginvites us to grapple honestly with the conflicting lessons and legacies of the Vietnam War.
Christian G. Appy is a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the author of two previous books on the Vietnam War. His oral history of the war, Patriots, was a main selection of Book of the Month Club and won the Massachusetts Book Award for nonfiction. He lives in Amherst.
Praise for Chris Appy’s American Reckoning
“Brilliant, beautiful, and painful, American Reckoning is an
essential book, not just because it looks so incisively at the
forces shaping our foreign policy in Vietnam and afterward, but
because it so brightly illuminates the question we all need to ask
ourselves: what is America's place in the
world?”
—Peter Davis, director of the Oscar-winning documentary Hearts and
Minds
“A triumph of originality. Appy weaves together a rich tapestry of
sources into a completely innovative, eye-opening, and compulsively
readable account of the Vietnam War and its far-reaching
consequences. American Reckoning offers a fresh lens for
understanding the United States in the context of its most
controversial conflict as well as its twenty-first-century wars.
It’s an impressive, valuable book.”
—Nick Turse, author of the New York Times bestseller Kill Anything
That Moves
“In the vast literature on the Vietnam War it’s the question that
has not received sustained and authoritative attention: How did the
long and bitter struggle in Southeast Asia influence Americans’
sense of themselves? Christian Appy’s penetrating and lucid account
helps us make sense as few books have of this difficult chapter in
the nation’s history.”
—Fredrik Logevall, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Embers of
War
“Christian Appy has written a compelling reflection on the Vietnam
War and its aftermath of endless war. He argues persuasively
that we must remember the war and its consequences if we are to
come to a full reckoning with the past and finally dispel the myth
of American exceptionalism.”
—Marilyn B. Young, author of The Vietnam Wars
Praise for Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All
Sides
“Christian Appy's Patriots should do for the Vietnam War what Studs
Terkel's The Good War did for World War II: remove it from the
realm of mythology and ground it in the vivid memories of people
who lived and fought in it and against it, who ran it and suffered
from it. This remarkable book is a genuine oral history of the
Vietnam War, true to its title, from all sides of the conflict.
Until now, no single book on the war has included so many different
American perspectives and so varied a group of Vietnamese voices.
That not only makes the book unique, it also means you can follow
the war from its true beginnings . . . all the way to Patty and
Earl Hopper Sr., still convinced that Vietnam holds American POWs.
By bringing Vietnamese voices and experiences to the story of what
is known in Vietnam as the American War, Appy challenges us in
unexpected ways. No review can do justice to the riches in
Patriots.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Inspired . . . Patriots is a gem of a book. Appy gives his
participants ample room to tell their stories, but his own
contribution to the sucess of the volumje is considerable. [The]
chapter introductions, which are crucial in lending cohesion to the
overall enterprise, are authoritative and elegantly written.”
—The Washington Post
“Appy allows each of his chosen voices to offer an unvarnished
recollection--painful, conflicted, occasionally beautiful--of an
extraordinary time.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Of all the works on the Vietnam War--fiction and nonfiction--this
is the big one . . . the book that was waiting to be written.”
—Studs Terkel
“As a Vietnam combat veteran who participated in most of the major
historical battles of 1968, I'm understadably ambivalent about
reading Vietnam books, fiction and nonfiction. Christian G. Appy's
Patriots is a different and even-handed approach to a still
controversial and divisive subject. The overall effect of listening
to different voices on the same sore subject is eye-opening and
revealing. Each voice sounds fresh, as if the storyteller had been
waiting for decades--and most of them had--to tell their story, to
relieve themselves of something that had been bothering them for a
long time, or just to set the record straight in their own minds.
At the end, I for one felt more than satisfied because I had
reached a greater understanding of the event that changed my life
and the life of the nation.”
—Nelson DeMille, author of The General's Daughter, Word of Honor,
and Plum Island
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