Dispatches

Herr, Michael

ISBN 10: 0394417887 / ISBN 13: 9780394417882

Published by Alfred A. Knopf, NY, 1977

About this Item

2 1/4" long sticker ghost, fairly faint, to back panel of jacket, jacket has some slight wear mostly to ends of spine. Previous owner name inked near top of ffep. 3 tiny faint ink marks to ffep. ; 260 pages.

Seller Inventory # 41819

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Dispatches
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, NY
• Publication Date: 1977
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0394417887
• ISBN 13: 9780394417882
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • VIETNAM WAR

About this title

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.

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