DISPATCHES - Hardcover

Herr, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394417887 ISBN 13: 9780394417882

Publisher: Knopf, 1977

Synopsis

Michael Herr went to Vietnam in 1967 as Esquire's correspondent. From the very first with the publication of his famous article, "Hell Sucks", he was accorded widespread, fervent acclaim. Dispatches confirms what his early admirers already knew: no one else has written so eloquently, so powerfully, so terrifyingly about what it was to fight in (and to survive) that ghastly war.

About this title

Review

If you've seen the movies Apocalypse Now and Platoon, in whose scripts Michael Herr had a hand, you have a pretty good idea of Herr's take on Vietnam: a hallucinatory mess, the confluence of John Wayne and LSD. Dispatches reports remarkable front-line encounters with an acid-dazed infantryman who can't wait to get back into the field and add Viet Cong kills to his long list ("I just can't hack it back in the World", he says); with a helicopter door gunner who fires indiscriminately into crowds of civilians; with daredevil photojournalist Sean Flynn, son of Errol, who disappeared somewhere inside Cambodia. Although Herr has admitted that parts of his book are fictional, this is meaty, essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Vietnam.

Michael Herr, who wrote about the Vietnam War for Esquire magazine, gathered his years of notes from his front-line reporting and turned them into what many people consider the best account of the war to date, when published in 1977. He captured the feel of the war and how it differed from any other theatre of combat, as well as the flavour of the time and the essence of the people who were there. Since Dispatches was published, other excellent books have appeared on the war--may we suggest The Things They Carried and The Sorrow of War--but Herr's book was the first to hit the target head-on and remains a classic. --Simon Kelly

Review

The best book I have ever read on men and war in our time. (John Le Carré)

Having read Dispatches, it is difficult to convey the impact of total experience as all the facades of patriotism, heroism and the whole colossal fraud of American intervention fall away to the bare bones of fear, war and death (William S. Burroughs)

Splendid . . . he brings alive the terror of combat in a way that rivals All Quiet on the Western Front (Tom Wolfe)

In the great line of Crane, Orwell and Hemingway . . . he seems to have brought to this book the ear of a musician and the eye of a painter, Frank Zappa and Francis Bacon (Washington Post)

We have all spent ten years trying to explain what happened to our heads and our lives in the decade we finally survived - but Michael Herr's Dispatches puts all the rest of us in the shade (Hunter S. Thompson)

If it were only unconventional journalism, it would stand with the best there is - but it's a good deal more than that . . . I believe it may be the best personal journal about war, about any war, that any writer has ever accomplished (Robert Stone)

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1977
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0394417887
• ISBN 13: 9780394417882
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 260