12/30/2023 0 Comments War hospital bookBoth suffer greatly throughout the novel. Often compared to Joseph Conrad and Ernest Hemingway, and largely considered one of the best Vietnam novels, Stone focuses on two characters, one of whom is a sailor traveling home from Vietnam. Winner of the 1974 National Book Award for Fiction, Dog Soldiers is a story of the Vietnam War and of drug smuggling. His death shortly after the publication of the second novel prevented these plans from coming to fruition. Hasford wrote this semi-autobiographical novel about his experiences in Vietnam and intended it to be a trilogy of Vietnam war books. It’s unlikely you’ve heard of The Short-Timers, a book that’s currently out of print, but you may have heard of the movie based on it: Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. Often cited as one of the best Vietnam war books, it is also one of the most recommended in Greene’s large body of work. Greene’s conclusion seems to be that America was a somewhat “innocent” nation that did not understand the people it was fighting with or against. The Quiet Americanby Graham GreeneĪ review in The New York Times in 1956 claimed that Greene’s novel about Vietnam had characters that stood in for nations and political factions rather than as their own people. Through not much more than their words and thoughts, the author creates a powerful story about the results of combat. The author did serve in the Marines, though not in Vietnam, and tells a convincing tale of the conversation between the men at a veteran’s hospital. This piece of short fiction is written almost entirely in dialogues and monologues between two critically wounded Marines in Vietnam. This autobiographical novel features rich characters when stock, cliché characters could have easily been used. One of the first fictional Vietnam war books, and often touted as one of the best Vietnam novels, it’s a face-paced wonder that follows draftee Philip Dosier as he is drafted into the war, completes a of tour of duty, and comes home. When I think back to reading either book for the first time, and other Vietnam war books, the memories that come to me are of the owl coffee mug I broke when reading The Things They Carried, or the stain in my thrift-shopped copy of Slaughterhouse-Five that surely represented blood, which seemed so appropriate. It strikes me that this is the way our memories work. Instead, they look at them sideways and upside down, they take bits and pieces and view their lives in war as tiny snapshots jumbled in a box, completely out of order. One of the things I loved so much-and that broke my heart so cleanly-about The Things They Carried was that it reminded me of another beloved war book, Slaughterhouse-Five, in that both books are written by authors who couldn’t seem to face straight-on the wars in which they’d fought. There was a time when all I knew of Vietnam war books was Tim O’Brien’s, The Things They Carried, a book that prompted the laconic entry in my book journal, “This book destroyed me.”
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