Don't Mean Nothing - Softcover

O'Neill, Susan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0982546270 ISBN 13: 9780982546277

Publisher: Serving House Books, 2001

Synopsis

In this debut fiction collection--the first by a nurse who served in Viet Nam--Susan O'Neill offers a glimpse into the war from a female perspective. These stories are about women, and men, who served in three combat hospitals in 1969 and 1970. They are interconnected, peopled by one-time "stars" and recurring characters, and they deal both with both the minutia of everyday life in wartime, and grander, more over-reaching themes--love and loss, faith and despair, morality, futility, military idiosyncrasy, magic, and the cost to the soul of a year in war's very particular hell. The stories are purely fictional, yet based loosely on the author's experiences, and they are laced as liberally with black humor as with pathos.

About this title

Review:

'O'Neill manages to salvage powerful new meanings from the terrible nothingness...as entertaining as it is harrowing' -- Los Angeles Times

'We've heard the Vietnam tales before, but never from this point of view. Susan O'Neill's Don't Mean Nothing is a valuable addition to the literature' -- Stewart O'Nan

From the Author:

Don’t Mean Nothing is a collection of short stories about medical personnel in Viet Nam. It is fiction; but like all fiction, there is an underlying basis in fact: I served 13 months in U.S. Army hospitals in 1969 -1970 as an Operating Room nurse.

The book is a schizophrenic mixture of tragedy and comedy, because that’s what it was, being female and a nurse in Viet Nam. My characters are doctors, nurses, corpsmen, grunts, REMFs, Vietnamese, even a monkey I borrowed from Asian folklore. I love them all; they are my Imaginary Friends.

DMN has gotten many kind reviews from the likes of Publisher’s Weekly, the LA Times, Booklist, the Detroit News, Boston Magazine, Mademoiselle (honest!) and my own UMaine alumni magazine (I’ve doubled my contribution, thank you). In fact, to date, it’s only gotten one negative review, a very snotty bit of put-down from Kirkus Reviews that ultimately pronounced it "M*A*S*H, with lots more sex and cursing." It was the first blurb I read upon the book’s US publication, and it broke my heart. After extensive therapy and a daily regimen of Prozac, I have decided the problem is theirs: they really didn’t appreciate my sense of humor. Ultimately, I’m grateful to Kirkus: not only did they give me the gift of humility, but that M*A*S*H tagline made a terrific T-shirt (I’d love to claim the idea as my own, but it really came from the brilliant Marilyn Knapp Litt, webmistress for the InCountry Women Website and Discussion Group. If you want to learn more about my sisters-in-arms and me, this is one of the best sources in the universe).

I hope you like my book. I hope it entertains you, challenges you, makes you laugh and, most important of all, makes you think. There seems to be a shortage of that these days.

Sincerely,
Susan Kramer O'Neill

About this edition

• Publisher: Serving House Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0982546270
• ISBN 13: 9780982546277
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 254