Amazon.com
When Nick Ut photographed 9-year-old Kim Phuc running down a road, her body aflame with napalm, he turned a terrified girl into a living symbol of the Vietnam War's horror. Even after the war, the North Vietnamese government made the severely scarred Kim a reluctant poster girl for American atrocities. Although her parents, once relatively prosperous South Vietnamese peasants, were reduced to dire poverty when the state took over her mother's noodle shop, Kim was allowed to receive further medical treatment in Germany, to visit the Soviet Union, and to attend the University of Havana. These privileges did not assuage her spiritual turmoil: Why had she been singled out for fame when so many others suffered and died? Searching for answers, Kim converted to Christianity and in 1992 defected with her husband to Canada, where they now live with their two sons. Canadian author Denise Chong's sensitive biography, which doubles as a fascinating social history of Vietnam during and after the war, captures Kim as a complex woman of powerful religious faith: "It was the fire of bombs that burned my body. It was the skill of doctors that mended my skin. But it took the power of God's love to heal my heart." --Wendy Smith
Book Description
On June 8, 1972, nine-year-old Kim Phuc, severely burned by napalm, ran from her blazing village in South Vietnam and into the eye of history. Her photograph-one of the most unforgettable images of the twentieth century-was seen around the world and helped turn public opinion against the Vietnam War.
This book is the story of how that photograph came to be-and the story of what happened to that girl after the camera shutter closed. Award-winning biographer Denise Chong's portrait of Kim Phuc-who eventually defected to Canada and is now a UNESCO spokesperson-is a rare look at the Vietnam War from the Vietnamese point-of-view and one of the only books to describe everyday life in the wake of this war and to probe its lingering effects on all its participants.
Customer Reviews:
Fascinating story at several levels.......2006-08-09
This is a wonderful book. It is interesting in the discussion of village life in Viet Nam during the war. It is also an interesting retelling of the physical, emotional, and spiritual journey of the little girl, so well known from the photo. The entire story of what happened to this little girl is quite readable and in fact inspirational. I did not find it to be sappy in any way, and in fact quite moving. I highly reccomend the book.
Life Is At Your Feet.......2006-06-21
This is the life story of Kim Phuc, with supporting coverage of the horrors of Vietnam and the endless legacy of pain and sorrow caused by the war. Kim was captured on film in the devastating news photo form 1972, as she ran naked and screaming from a napalm attack (which turned out to be a friendly-fire accident, to boot). While reading this book, I was unable to stop flipping it over to look at the famous photo on the cover again and again, as writer Denise Chong does an outstanding job of bringing Kim and her story to life. Granted, the book does have a few weaknesses. Chong obviously saw the need to add background information about the war to support Kim's story, though in the attempt to summarize or introduce the issues and politics of the war, Chong's coverage seems simplistic and perfunctory. Also, as Kim's biography progresses, Chong is trying too hard, and inconsistently, to make the book "inspirational," with Kim's inner thoughts and reflections on her ongoing struggles coming across as forced and sappy in places.
But these weaknesses do not damage the overall success of the book, because Kim's life story is definitely compelling, and her postwar struggles are especially informative. We learn about the wartime travails of Kim's middle-class Vietnamese family, culminating in the horrific day when she was injured and barely survived. Kim has suffered through chronic pain and constant health problems stemming from here severe napalm burns. Meanwhile the incompetent new Communist regime in Vietnam used her for years as a pawn in propaganda schemes, and ruined her once successful family. Kim spent most of her teen and young adult years trying to escape the regime's clutches and finish her schooling; and interestingly, she observed the collapse of two Communist systems, both at home and as an exchange student in Cuba. (She now lives as an activist in Canada.) Chong's coverage of the postwar hardships of those affected by the Vietnam War is especially valuable, because you see little of this type of material in standard war texts. And you will surely root for Kim Phuc as she slowly puts her lifetime of horrors behind her. [~doomsdayer520~]
Surviving the devastation of war.......2005-10-29
I liked this book because it gave me a portrait of one girls struggle with the affects of war, how she was used by both side of the struggle as a poster child and how she got through it all. I am close in age to Kim Puc and the photograph of her affected me when I was young. I had not heard about this book when I came across it at the library. It turned out to be a good story and an informative lesson in a story of living through the Vietnam War and beyond. I would recommend this to anyone who is looking for a story of survival.
Heartrending.......2003-11-29
You don't really enjoy a book like this. It's a story of almost unremitting suffering. I found the story riveting, well written and troubling. Of course, I knew the picture and I'd seen the documentary when I was in England several years ago, but the details in the book and the evident research provide a much deeper understanding.
It is a very human story, the suffering of one girl in particular, but also her family, and she is one of many. The book gives a concise account of the historical background to the bombing. It will serve as a good introduction to those that do not know about these events, and will be useful for visitors to Vietnam.
The author also narrates the stories of members of Kim Phuc's family and their struggle for existence during those hard times. I've been to Vietnam, including Saigon, not far from where the awful atrocity took place, so I feel a closeness to the place. I saw the famous photograph in the American War Crimes Museum (now renamed) in Saigon.
My life in Bali cannot compare to Kim Phuc's, but I understand a little some of her family's difficulties - the paranoid fear of Communism in the 1960s (there was an alleged Communist coup in Indonesia in 1965), the hard work involved in running a small restaurant (I started mine from scratch in 1974 just like Kim's mother did) and the hassles of dealing with officials (the author describes these well).
It is doubly distressing that Kim Phuc was so cruelly used and cheated by others for their own purposes. Governments, officials, journalists. One can only have contempt for them and wish Kim Phuc a better life in Canada.
I would certainly recommend this book to anyone. It has 370 pages and there are several pages of photographs.
Denise Chong does a fantastic job.......2001-01-09
I have read hundreds of books on Vietnam. This is one of the best. It really gets across the point of view of those poor peasants in the rural areas caught between the communists on one side and the government on the other side. That the girl survived was a miracle. All the pain and suffering that resulted after the communists took over is well documented. This young lady because of the photo was helped from time to time by those on both sides. She became a personal friend of Pham Van Dong the Communist leader of Vietnam. Yet this did not stop her or her family from suffering under the communists.
Average customer rating:
- Good starting point
- some people need to re-evaluate
- Excellent review of Vietnam literature
- A Sorry Fiction Masquerading As "History"
- Sloppy journalism perpetuating the same tired myths as fact.
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The Vietnam Reader: The Definitive Collection of Fiction and Nonfiction on the War
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English Workshop: Complete Course
ASIN: 0385491182
Release Date: 1998-10-20 |
Amazon.com
"A few years ago," Stewart O'Nan, editor of The Vietnam Reader, writes in his introduction, "when I began teaching the American literature of the Vietnam War, I tried to find an anthology my students could use.... But as I searched through libraries and catalogues, new- and used-book shops, I discovered there wasn't one." So O'Nan set out to create one himself. What began as course material has grown into a remarkable collection of writing that will appeal to a broad audience of readers interested in the Vietnam experience. O'Nan includes a little bit of everything--fiction and nonfiction from acclaimed writers such as Tim O'Brien, Louise Erdrich, Michael Herr, and David Halberstam; poetry and drama by Michael Casey and David Rabe; even songs such as Barry Sadler's "The Ballad of the Green Berets" and Credence Clearwater Revival's "Fortunate Son." There are also essays on the major Vietnam films, from The Deer Hunter to Full Metal Jacket, and a smattering of famous photographs from the war.
What makes this collection extraordinary is not just the quality of the writing it contains but also the breadth of attitudes O'Nan represents. For instance, he juxtaposes an excerpt from Ron Kovic's antiwar memoir, Born of the Fourth of July with James Webb's gung-ho paean to fighting the good fight in Fields of Fire. Chapters of Tim O'Brien's hallucinatory fiction Going After Cacciato resonate with excerpts from his earlier memoir If I D ie in a Combat Zone as well the journalism of Michael Herr (Dispatches) and Philip Caputo (A Rumor of War). Creating sections such as "Early Work," "The Oral History Boom," "Memoirs," "Homecoming," and more, O'Nan seeks to convey as much of the war experience from as many different perspectives as possible. Anyone interested in history and in fine writing will find The Vietnam Reader worthy reading. --Alix Wilber
Book Description
The Vietnam Reader is a selection of the finest and best-known art from the American war in Vietnam, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, film, still photos, and popular song lyrics. All the strongest work is here, from mainstream bestsellers to radical poetry, from Tim O'Brien to Marvin Gaye. Also included are incisive reader's questions--useful for educators and book clubs--in a volume that makes an essential contribution to a wider understanding of the Vietnam War.
This authoritative and accessible volume is sure to become a classic reference, as well as indispensable and provocative reading for anyone who wants to know more about the war that changed the face of late-twentieth-century America.
Customer Reviews:
Good starting point.......2006-10-16
I read this when it came out, and it pointed me toward buying and reading several works I probably wouldn't have otherwise. Of course, this work contains fiction and nonfiction, plus movie reviews, and song lyrics. I'm kind of confused why some earlier reviewers are upset. If there are some mistaken captions, so be it. The direction the book steers readers is ultimately what matters. It is a noble effort indeed to try and waken the consciousness of some readers who would otherwise be ignorant of the important works herein, and/or the Vietnam war era. If O'Nan's book helps the reading public to pick up other books on Vietnam, then he has succeeded admirably. The movie reviews are his own with supplementary comments by others. If readers have a problem with the content, direct that ire toward the individual authors, and not the compilator.
Buy the book, it's great!
some people need to re-evaluate.......2003-08-29
The title says it all: FICTION and NON FICTION and if you read the intro to this book it says that O'Nan is a teacher of Vietnam LITERATURE not history. The selections in the book are examples of popular vietnam some are fiction. The picture of the little girl and the napalm bombing is one of the most famous pictures concerning the war.
I think this book is a great overview of vietnam era literature and reccommend it to anyone interested in vietnam lit. It also contains photos, poetry, song lyrics ( remember country joe and the fish?), and commentary on several movies. it is also seperated into categories like the first major wave of work that came towards the end of the war and the second major wave of work which can about a decade after the war which gives a nice chronological view.
Excellent review of Vietnam literature.......2003-02-22
... O'Nan has put together some of the best literature written by Americans about the Vietnam War since the late '60s. A quick look at the table of contents should put anyone's doubts to rest--especially since O'Nan has included a generous amount of space to Tim O'Brien, certainly the finest American writer about the Vietnam War. I had two problems with this book, besides the fact that this should be available in hardback. 1) O'Nan has failed to include anything from Thom Jones's book "The Pugilist at Rest"--an excellent writer, close on O'Brien's tail in terms of sheer storytelling. 2) This book includes nothing by Vietnamese writers--which I find a huge oversight...
This book does not pretend to be history...
A Sorry Fiction Masquerading As "History".......2000-10-29
This book is an unadulterated piece of CR--!! The author made no attempt to cross-check the material he put into it, and re-printed a large number of Vietnam War Myths, - the girl in the napalm strike, the 19 year old casualty, and many others, - as facts. If he is really teaching our youth the "history" of the Vietnam War using this tripe he should be called up before an academic review board and disciplined for sloppy research and distortion of the Nation's real effort in Southeast Asia.
Do yourself a favor and read a "real" book about the Vietnam War, one such as Geunter Lewy's "America in Vietnam", or Andrew Krepinevich's "The Army and Vietnam", if you are stuck with this one, read Burkett and Whitley's "Stolen Valor" in order to sort out the real from the fanciful.
Sloppy journalism perpetuating the same tired myths as fact........1999-05-22
I knew as soon as I got to page 2 of the intro that this would be a re-hash compilation of old B.S. war stories and half-baked myths masquerading as "Vietnam war history". And O'Nan is apparently still teaching this nonsense to unsuspecting college students! Take the oft-disproved LIES like "the average age of the combat soldier in Vietnam was 19". This doesn't square with the reality that the average age of those whose names are listed on The Wall and whose MOS is 11B (combat infantry) is 22.6 years of age. The average age of all Vietnam war fatalities was 23.1 years. Where does he come up with 19? Later we see those two famous (infamous) Vietnam photos with their DECEPTIVE captions. On page 439 "A South Vietnamese girl flees a U.S. napalm strike by Highway 1." Had O'Nan bothered to check his facts he'd discover that NO AMERICAN had any role whatsoever in this incident. South Vietnamese pilots flying South Vietnamese jets under the orders of South Vietnamese air controllers dropped the napalm on North Vietnamese Army positions in the village of Trang Bang when this picture was taken, June 8, 1972. Phan Thi Kim Phuc's injuries WERE NOT caused by any U.S. soldier. Later on page 691, we learn that "As Saigon falls, helicopters evacuate the U.S. embassy." More crap. The rooftop evacuation in the photo is from THE PITTMAN APARTMENTS in Saigon. Many of the works and authors cited in The Vietnam Reader were also critiqued in the book STOLEN VALOR. In Stolen Valor you will learn that many of the "Vets" writing these exciting stories of combat derring-do WEREN'T EVEN IN VIETNAM (if they were indeed in the service at all!) Do yourself a favor. If you want an honest, authoritative, objective, and well-documented expose' of thirty years of Vietnam war mis-information, read Stolen Valor instead.
Customer Reviews:
Vietnam on Film.......2004-06-11
These film essays look at documentary filmmaking and news reporting on the Vietnam War. I read this book as part of a film class at in college. This book is best for a person interested in the representation of war, especially this particularily divisive war will be moved by reading this book.
Sleepless in Heaven!.......2000-02-24
This book was amazing! It was very insightful and deep. I learned more about this era from this book than i ever did in high school!
Amazon.com
The groundbreaking publication Another Vietnam: Pictures of the War from the Other Side is an intense collection of images, many never seen before, from the cameras of North Vietnamese photographers. Each included photographer has a chapter highlighting his personal stories and captivating pictures. The stories are riveting and sometimes ironic: one revolutionary photographer falsified identification cards for Communist fighters, another traveled side by side with guerrillas, while another barely escaped a bombing campaign only to be forever haunted by the loss of his film and equipment.
With almost no resources, a serious lack of film, and outdated equipment, these committed photographers used will and determination in order to record history. From film processed under a night sky with homemade chemicals to making one roll of film last for years, each individual tale is a testament to the power of perseverance. Some of the pictures are haunting (a devastated landscape with the intense flare of napalm, an emergency surgery in a mangrove swamp), while others capture a seemingly staged Communist resolve (smiling soldiers with little children, classic hero poses shot from below). This book offers an important pictorial viewpoint and fills in many gaps from the popular Western media coverage of the war. --J.P. Cohen
Book Description
For more than 25 years, American memory has been haunted by photographs of the Vietnam War, the most troubling and divisive foreign conflict in our history. Our collective recollection and deep familiarity with the war has been shaped by the work of the courageous civilian and military photographers who worked alongside American troops on the fields of battle. Yet there remains an experience of the war in Vietnam that we have rarely seen—that of the other side.
Author and veteran combat photographer Tim Page, who was a freelancer for UPI during the war, returned to Vietnam to find his surviving North Vietnamese counterparts, the photographers who spent as many as ten years documenting, with equal depth and courage, their nation¼s conflict with America. From interviews with these forgotten men and from their surprising photographs, a stunning new visual record of the war emerges in Another Vietnam. Among the many remarkable images of daily life and battle on the North Vietnamese side are the elephants moving munitions down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, an impromptu operating room in a mangrove swamp, Jane Fonda on her controversial trip in-country, and American POWs at the Hanoi Hilton. Released to coincide with a major National Geographic Television documentary, Another Vietnam provides a rare and captivating change of perspective and a moving meditation on the sacrifice and loss on both sides of the war.
Customer Reviews:
Beautiful Lies.......2005-08-05
The Cliff Notes version of the critics and reviewers who liked this book would be "Yeah, its some propaganda but its more than that". To this I say it is almost nothing but propaganda.
Look at the pictures. All except the most mundane photos are clearly staged. The subjects are all in properly heroic stances, the enemy bodies are all perfectly mangled and in nice rows and the ambushes are textbook perfect. Heck, the smoke even billows just right! A good example is the swamp surgery photograph everyone seems to fawn over. The water is calm, the supposedly wounded soldier is calmly awaiting the doctors and the surgical team show not even an iota of tension. If you believe this is a real time pic, I have some beachfront property in Kansas Id like to sell you!
And heres another thing. There are only three pictures involving the American military. Ive seen pictures from Communist Bloc sources of Communist Vietnamese troops prancing around dead Americans. Why are these not in the book? My guess is the editors couldnt get their sources to part with such pics. Its not something the Communist Viets would want to reveal at a time when theyre fresh out of friends and desperately needing US economic assistance!
Do I think this book is worthless? No. It does give us at least a partial image of how the other side saw things. And the pictures do have a stark grandeur to them. The problem is the editors try to make this tome to be something that its not. Its a collection of propaganda photos. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Collection of Posed Propaganda Photos .......2005-07-12
This book is a collection of posed propaganda photos by the same people that brought you reeducation camps and inspired millions of their fellow citizens to flee abroad.
I can't believe anyone is gullible enough to believe that all but a handful of these photos were anything but posed propaganda. You see "combat" photos with soldiers in spotless uniforms, clean faces and purposeful (but never frightened) expressions. I suppose the editors just couldn't pass up an opportunity to denigrate the U.S./South Vietnam War effort.
If you want to know about real life in Vietnam and how the war influenced it I suggest you read something by Duong Thu Huong instead of spending your money on this silliness
Very good book, but..........2005-01-08
Tim Page's Nam is one of my most cherished books about military history because the spectacular photographs succeed in conveying not just a visual depiction of the war but also the emotions of its participants (in the case of that book , focusing primarily on U.S. forces). I was therefore very excited to see this new volume compiled by Page and his team, which is full of photographs of the war from the perspective of the North Vietnamese. However, I gave this book four stars rather than five because of one disappointment I have with it: Nearly all the photos depicting battles or battlefields or in any way involve "the enemy" focus on ARVN forces. There were hardly any photos that had anything to do with U.S. forces or any of the other foreign armies defending the South. This struck me as quite odd. I realize the book's authors are limited by the photographs available to them (i.e. ones taken by photographers travelling with Viet Cong and NVA forces), but surely it can't be that these photographers never took pictures of subjects that involve forces other than the ARVN. In this sense I felt like the book fell short of telling the entire story of the other side. However, this book is still very much worth owning, so don't let my one complaint scare you away.
First rate, typical of Tim Page, Chris Riley and Doug Niven.......2002-12-07
Having studied Tim Page's great work "Requiem" tens of times, each time seeing something new in the striking photographs, and having seen Riley and Niven's brilliant work on the killing fields of Cambodia, I knew what to expect when I opened "Another Vietnam." This is a natural follow-on to "Requiem" and reflects Tim Page's admiration for war photographers on all sides. I have the feeling that Tim Page is still at work seeking out new information on some of his closest friends who disappeared on the battlefields of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. I hope to see more film documentaries from Tim Page. His investigations, first documented in his film "Danger at the Edge of Town," will continue until all his colleagues are accounted for. No one can accuse Tim Page of having forgotten his heroic comrades. They live on in his lifetime of work.
Another look at Nam........2002-10-14
Most of these pictures record tiny episodes, but those thinkers with a long view might refuse to accept that there were ever two Nams in the 20th Century. When France tried to pick a southern area called Cochin China for itself as a French colony in 1945, there should be little doubt that it was merely usurping part of Ho Chi Minh's independent Vietnam. A picture shows Ho in Hanoi, 39 days after his declaration of Vietnamese independence on Sept. 2, 1945. The picture of Le Minh Truong by himself, Kontum, 1972 (p. 114) is as unexciting as my own pictures taken in that area in 1970. The surprising picture on page 49 was taken May 9, 1973, soon after the American withdrawal: "Cuban leader Fidel Castro hoists a victory flag at the site of the strategic 1968 battle [Khe Sanh]." There are so many troops in the picture that it doesn't show any bomb craters, and a mountain in the background (possibly as far away as Laos) shows that the area was not entirely leveled. Khe Sanh had the highest priority for B-52 strikes when North Vietnamese troops threatened the U.S. troops there and this book says that "was part of the North's plan to divert U.S. and South Vietnamese forces from population areas prior to the Tet offensive." (p. 49). This might provide a lesson for anyone planning a war against American forces, which are bound to rely on a strategy which depends heavily on bombing, and Americans are organized so they pay more attention to their top priority than to anything else. A panorama made from six negatives of "supply trucks rolling through a ghost forest denuded by defoliants dropped by American planes" (p. 135) shows some of the damage from 40 million pounds of Agent Orange "which were sprayed over five million acres, creating environmental havoc." (p. 135). Such tactics suggest that the war was against Nam as a whole, and not a strategy that would have been adopted by one half against the other. The American Civil War was pretty bad, but Abe Lincoln never nuked the South. General Sherman was hard on South Carolina, but not as bad as Americans who wanted to nuke Nam. The defoliated mangrove forest, Ca Mau Peninsula, 1970 (p. 104-5) looks awful, "Americans denuded the landscape with chemicals to deny cover," as if we were involved in a cat and mouse game, but couldn't decide how serious we wanted it to be. A weird picture in which "An NVA soldier positions a Chinese-made mannequin" (p. 60) (a long time after Hamburger Hill) is the perfect: SO? SHOOT ME picture.
I found a lot of irony in the information on page 56 about only 8 of 109 students (the guys who are smiling) being accepted into the army in Hanoi, Aug. 1971. The standards were tough: these "young men were chosen because they had good revolutionary credentials, which usually meant that they didn't come from landowning families." This sounds like a perfect way to pick people who would be willing to hold on to a government job, regardless of the circumstances. The increase in the NVA, from 35,000 in 1950 to over 500,000 by the mid-1970s, didn't require a mandatory system until 1973, when the United States withdrew and the NVA was free to pursue military objectives without being bombed. With the use of American support, South Vietnam's ARVN were capable of suffering "243,000 dead and a half a million seriously wounded." (p. 202).
Picture (p. 218) Russian MIGs "at a remote air base" on January 1, 1973 and the military parade (p. 220) on the outskirts of Hanoi in October, 1973, after the United States had stopped its bombing. Hiding all these things is the result of a lot of effort. On page 54, Hanoi, 1972 "Military trucks park in relative safety in front of the French embassy. . . . In November 1971, however, American bombs accidentally struck the embassy." It sounds like the embassy was still pretty safe, but the attack on the U.S. Embassy by a squad of Viet Cong sappers on January 31, 1968, mentioned on p. 151, definitely sounded intentional.
Book Description
A brilliant father-son biography of the scandalous life of movie star Errol Flynn -- and of his son's equally glamorous yet doomed career as a war photographer in Vietnam
On April 6, 1970, the charismatic Sean Flynn rode his motorcycle into a roadblock, was captured by the Vietcong, and vanished into the jungle. Errol's son shared his father's good looks, charm, athleticism, courage, and artistic talent. But Sean also inherited his father's love of risk, compelling him to lead an equally romantic but tragically brief life.
The story of both men's chillingly similar lives begins with Errol. He was born in Australia, where his mother either beat him or ignored him. He spent his early adult life in the savage outposts of New Guinea as a tobacco planter, gold prospector, bird trapper, diamond smuggler, and slave trader. By the time fame arrived, drinking, drugs, and sex with underage girls assured him legendary status for recklessness, as well as an early death.
Sean was obsessed with his father, a remote and mythical figure. Never able to break free from Errol's overpowering legacy, Sean established his own heroic reputation. The father played a daredevil on screen, the son -- as brilliant and daring as his father -- was driven to increase the stakes. His final gallant and suicidal gesture carried the Flynn tradition to its inevitable conclusion.
Customer Reviews:
Very good book!.......2005-06-07
To the best of my knowledge this is a well researched account of the life of Flynn. A person who seems to be one of those types who is either loved or despised intensely, Flynn is a tough subject for an unbiased account. Mr. Meyer's book, according to some Flynn experts is flawed in some details however the basic facts and incidents offered are well supported and provide a truly tragic and sad saga of a man whose influence on myself has been inescapable! I learned of Flynn as a young toddler watching his films from my daddies knee. I always enjoyed Bogart, Cagney, Cooper and Wayne however there was always something so much more compelling in Flynn's classic films. It was very painful for me to read of his life. This is something I'd purposely held back from doing in light of all the unsubstantiated negative stories surrounding Flynn's life. It was particularly hard to read of his son's tragic life. Perhaps it's not possible to have an entirely accurate representation of Flynn or that of his son given their nature and circumtances. Being a new father myself I plan on spending as much quality time as I possibly can with my son!
Two Stars for Sean.......2003-06-02
I have to agree with Mr. Hurst's eloquent review, and I'll put it more succinctly: this is a lousy book. Why write a biography of Errol Flynn, of all people, if you're going to do it with no humor and with lordly disdain? It's like a biography of Tom Sawyer written by his half-brother, the tattle-tale goody-goody Sid. Like many, I guess, I picked it up in order to read about Sean Flynn, since there is so little out there about him. But as noted, Sean is reduced to three chapters presented as endpapers. One might conclude there wasn't enough to his short life to make a full book... if there weren't so much other evidence of the biographer's tendency to stop researching once he has enough evidence to support his (rather ugly) pre-determined thesis.
A JOYLESS TREATMENT OF A JOYFUL, ROLLICKING LIFE.......2003-04-07
Jeffrey Meyers, best known for his works on such literary figures as D. H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a gifted, at times brilliant biographer. Here he brings to his treatment of Errol and Sean Flynn his knowledge of the world's great literature. Meyers can take almost any figure and make him acceptable from a literary point of view. Who else could find a parallel between Errol Flynn and Edgar Allan Poe? One can imagine a future Meyers biography of Bugsy Siegel, with frequent allusions to Julius Caesar, Faust, and MacBeth.
Meyers's gift for finding parallels between disparate people's lives is especially impressive. I found those between the lives of John Barrymore and Flynn to be especially compelling and insightful - more so than those between Errol and Sean. With reference to Sean, few will feel competent to judge the validity of Meyers' sections which reincarnate his last days. Some of it I found persuasive, but other parts - especially some of the links in the chain of logic - seemed weak; the recreation of "the facts" may be a bit too confident when dealing with mainly hearsay evidence.
In the main section of this book Errol Flynn comes across as a tragic, forlorn, dejected, melancholic sociopath. The habitual choice to put Flynn in a darker rather than positive light surfaces in numerous ways, as in Meyers' handling of Basil Rathbone. All biography involves some shading of details, which usually goes under the heading of "literary license." But the deliberate reshaping of a quotation by rearrangement and omission, for the purpose of producing the desired result, is disingenuous - a distinct "no-no" for a front-rank biographer. At the top of p. 146, a long comment of Basil Rathbone is subtly rearranged so as to produce the desired result ý to contribute to Meyers' overall scheme of the father-son shared death-wish. It creates a false impression of what Rathbone actually wrote about Flynn, and leaves one wondering how many other things have been cleverly reshaped in order to fit the thesis.
The question therefore lingers: Does Meyers actually get under Errolýs skin (or that of Sean for that matter)? The answer, I fear, must be no - despite what Meyers and his publicists say. Meyers, in my opinion, is far too detached in his literary mien to explore effectively a man like Flynn. His Flynn is a two-dimensional, black-and-white figure who set out to destroy himself. The real-life Flynn was an infuriatingly complex, three-dimensional, Technicolor personality. Meyers is a very careful writer, but he also tends to be a cold, dispassionate, joyless writer, with an occasional tendency toward shading and over simplification. One gets little sense of the joi-de-vivre of the Errol Flynn of this book. Flynn was at heart a very, very funny man.
On the other hand there is something un-humorous, at points even tiresome, about INHERITED RISK. The whole thing is written from the point of view of Greek tragedy. It is doubtful that after reading it the reader will have chuckled even once. This is a major failing in a biography of Errol Flynn. The ever-so-literate Meyers, in all his zeal to analyze him - to dissect him into his component parts and to isolate his various destructive influences - has somehow let the real Flynn elude him.
There are other anomalies in INHERITED RISK. In one of his appendices (p. 326), Meyers breaks down Flynn's films into three categories: "best," "seeable," and "poor." With all due respect to Meyers, the list is bizarre, and may call into question his cinematic judgment. Is "The Roots of Heaven" (1958) really a better film than "They Died with Their Boots On" (1941) or "Adventures of Don Juan" (1949)? What cinematic myopia would place "The Sisters" (1938), "Edge of Darkness" (1943), and "Northern Pursuit" (1943) - not to mention "Silver River" (1948) - into the "poor" category?
Despite the dual photos on the front of the dust-jacket, the book is not really an analysis of the relationship of the two men, Errol and Sean, along the lines of Sir Edmund Goss' FATHER AND SON. The disparity in the treatments is made clear by the arrangement - Sean constitutes the endpapers (totaling a mere 49 pages), while the main section deals with Errol (244 pages). There is thus a serious question of balance.
Also, Meyers' central idea of Greek tragedy - that of the fatal character flaw of the father being reproduced in the son, leading to the latter's inevitable doom, does not really come off - no matter how energetically Meyers tries. One gets from this book the clear impression that the lives of the two Flynns were a complete waste. That may well have been true of the son, but it can't be said of the father. Errol Flynn brought untold joy to millions worldwide ý and still does to this day.
INHERITED RISK is a missed opportunity. With all the research that went into the book, it could have been the best Flynn biography ever written. But throughout most of it Meyersý staid approach just doesn't hold the readerýs attention. There is also a procrustean feel ý the impression that the lives of these two men are being stretched and cut to fit the "Greek tragedy" model that Meyers is pushing. Such shortcomings, sadly, mar what otherwise might have been a monumental biographical achievement.
Two subjects with the same pathos.......2003-03-29
There is a tendency to describe people whose lives veer into chaos far more frequently than our own as troubled. The balance is provided in this book by rendering an account of how superior the lives of ERROL AND SEAN FLYNN IN HOLLYWOOD AND VIETNAM seem compared to the rest of us. I'm partial to this account because I was already a fan of the Flynn associates in Nam: Tim Page, Michael Herr, John Steinbeck IV, Robert Sam Anson, and Dana Stone. Dana Stone gets credit for taking the photo in Ha Than in 1968 in which Sean Flynn, "In full battle dress and holding a grenade, with arms outstretched and right boot in midair, he charges over the top of the hill and attacks the North Vietnamese enemy. . . . After the officer was wounded, Sean saved the day by assuming one of Errol's movie roles, leading the charge himself and killing an enemy soldier." (pp. 55-56). There are few pictures of Sean in this book, but real fans will have the collection in REQUIEM: BY THE PHOTOGRAPHERS WHO DIED IN VIETNAM AND INDOCHINA, edited by Horst Faas and Tim Page.
The picture of Sean Flynn and Dana Stone on motorcycles in Vietnam, c. 1970, facing page 97, might be rough for those whose expectations were shaped by Jack Warner's "considerable shrewdness and a clear grasp of public taste." (caption to picture 11). Errol Flynn was interesting enough to dominate the first 29 pictures in this book. Then number 30 shows Sean Flynn with a friend, Steve Cutter, in 1958, and the final page of pictures shows the contrast between the highly professional look of an American studio portrait, c. 1962, and how Sean and Dana would look when last seen by Western eyes.
If armies are usually considered highly disciplined, as well as the most modern, civilized mechanism for establishing order in the midst of chaos, Sean and Dana miscalculated how outrageously the enemy in Cambodia would be striving for something else, that they hadn't counted upon. A journalist card issued by the U.S. Department of Defense was supposed to be sufficient to convince the inhabitants of this planet that they possessed the opportunity to have their story told to the world, and the cameras should have convinced the enemy that the main thing the Americans wanted to take was pictures. Part of Sean's trouble was that he was expecting to see more than the usual amount of trouble. The previous year, Sean spent a few days in jail in Djakarta because of a 17-year-old high school girl, daughter of a Caltex corporation lawyer and a princess from Sumatra, "named after a Hindu goddess." (p. 49). For me (still an effetely snobbish reader and broadcaster of my own opinions), being in the army was like spending two years with the Djakarta taxi driver who drove Sean and the girl to her home in his Mercedes taxi. The taxi driver assumed that the girl was the hot attraction that Sean thought she was and returned with a Chinese businessman. The story is related partly in words that Sean wrote to his mother November 2 and December 4, 1969, which admitted that Sean "stepped out of the bushes swinging a baseball bat. He smashed the car's and windshield, then attacked the driver. The Chinese customer meanwhile had fled." (p. 49).
Tying it all together like this book does is a hoot: "American officers expected extraordinary courage from Errol's son and Sean always met their expectations. Accompanying the 4th Division's long-range recon patrollers for a month, Sean walked point on dangerous four-man patrols in the northern Highlands. He stayed in a besieged bunker at Kon Tien where, in only three days, 375 Marines were wounded." (p. 51). As famous as Sean Flynn became, it might still be possible to find 375 Marines who remember being wounded in the same bunker at Kon Tien, but it seems more likely they were wounded at Con Thien when Sean was in some other country. Sean probably had more combat experience than most of the guys on walking recon patrols for the 4th Division, who previously were more likely to have some incident of looking for a lost pet in their childhood than of finding anything in the Highlands. Most of the 4th Division called it the Central Highlands. Up north, where the Marine operated, Con Thien was at one end of the McNamara Line on the map on page 127 of HISTORICAL ATLAS OF THE VIETNAM WAR by Harry G. Summers, Jr. According to an official count in that book, 3,077 mortar, artillery, and rocket rounds struck the base there during the week of September 19-27, 1967, only three months after Sean Flynn photographed the results of the six-day Arab-Israeli War, when, "On his way back from Sinai, Sean dragged a recoilless rifle behind his rented Volkswagen and gave it to Mandy Rice-Davies (who had been implicated in the John Profumo spy-and-sex scandal in Britain and had emigrated to Israel) to decorate her discotheque in Tel Aviv." (Meyers, p. 45).
Most of ERROL AND SEAN FLYNN IN HOLLYWOOD AND VIETNAM is devoted to the life of Errol Flynn, pages 59-303. His death of a heart attack was rather pathetic, as the doctors in those days seemed better able to find heart problems in an autopsy setting than "when Flynn suddenly felt sharp pains in his back and legs." (p. 295). A doctor told him to ease the pain by lying on the floor. "After an autopsy, the coroner found that his death was caused by myocardial infarction (blood not reaching the heart), coronary thrombosis (clot in the coronary blood vessels) and coronary atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries)." (p. 295). Errol's mother, Marelle, wrote to Sean two months later that "my poor boy knew that he had not long to live. He had several heart attacks, & had been warned seriously only a short time ago." (p. 295).
Extremely well written Biography!.......2002-10-04
As a long time fan of Errol Flynn, I had to buy this latest biography. This is probably one of the best written biographies on Flynn I have ever read. It is right up there with MY WICKED WICKED WAYS by Flynn himself. This book is painstakingly researched with obvious assistance from the Flynn family for accuracy. No outrageous claims are made as in the past books about the actor. It is downright eerie how parallel Sean and Errol Flynn's lives really were. Definitely a must read for Flynn fans and highly recommended to those who love all things Classic Hollywood.
Reviewed by Miriam van Veen
Book Description
The Vietnam War has been depicted by every available medium, each presenting a message, an agenda, of what the filmmakers and producers choose to project about America's involvement in Southeast Asia. This collection of essays, most of which are previously unpublished, analyzes the themes, modes, and stylistic strategies seen in a broad range of films and television programs.
From diverse perspectives, the contributors comprehensively examine early documentary and fiction films, postwar films of the 1970s such as The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now, and the reformulated postwar films of the 1980s—Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, and Born on the Fourth of July. They also address made-for-television movies and serial dramas like China Beach and Tour of Duty. The authors show how the earliest film responses to America's involvement in Vietnam employ myth and metaphor and are at times unable to escape glamorized Hollywood. Later films strive to portray a more realistic Vietnam experience, often creating images that are an attempt to memorialize or to manufacture different kinds of myths. As they consider direct and indirect representations of the war, the contributors also examine the power or powerlessness of individual soldiers, the racial views presented, and inscriptions of gender roles. Also included in this volume is a chapter that discusses teaching Vietnam films and helping students discern and understand film rhetoric, what the movies say, and who they chose to communicate those messages.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent account of Seventies film.......2000-10-24
Of the volumes in the excellent History of the American Cinema series, this is the best by far. Cook provides a superb, balanced overview of the film industry in the 1970s, considering practically every aspect of the topic--from the economics of the industry to the production trends to even the distribution and innovations in film technology. For any serious student of film history, this is a must read!
Recommended for movie buffs and film historians........2000-03-04
David A. Cook's volume Lost Illusions contributes Volume 9 to the ongoing History of the American Cinema series, covering the period from 1970-79 when American cinema operated against the social conditions of Vietnam and Watergate. The rise of film conglomerates is charted along with new filmmaking techniques.
Book Description
It's time for Tet! This vibrant, unique counting book introduces children to the rich traditions of the Vietnamese New Year. A playful village of mice lead young readers through the joyful celebration, as exquisitely embroidered illustrations recreate ten scenes of preparation, gift giving, feasting, and firework displays. With simple text followed by an informative afterword, Ten Mice for Tet is a joyful tribute to a special holiday.
Honors for Ten Mice for Tet!:
2004 CCBC (Cooperative Children's Book Center) Choices selection
Kirkus Reviews starred review
2004 Notable Books for a Global Society
Customer Reviews:
recommended.......2007-08-14
Great book for little ones about the Vietnamese New Year. The embroidered illustrations are phenomenal.
Engaging illustrations and perfectly simple text.......2007-05-13
My 2 yo loves this book, on the 1 Mouse plans a party page we talk about all the people she will invite to our party and by the end she cheers Happy New Year (in Vietnamese) with me. She was enchanted by Lunar New Year this year, and this book has been a wonderful way to help keep it alive for her. We are not Vietnamese and we love this book.
Great book to learn about Tet.......2007-02-14
This is a great book for preschoolers to teach about some of the activities related to the Vietnamese New Year and its celebration. The embroidered illustrations are quite intricate. I highly recommend this simple, yet informative book.
great book of vietnamese traditions.......2005-01-25
this book is simple but filled with information. one mouse plans a party, two mice go to market, 3 mice paint and polish, 4 mice prepare a feast, 5 mice learn their fortunes, 6 mice open presents...etc. The last two pages of the book give further information on each activity - what it is and why it is an important tradition. I like it because most books do not focus on the vietnamese tradition of Chinese New Year. Our family is of Vietnamese heritage, so this book is best for us.
Ten Mice is Great!.......2003-11-04
What a unique book! A must for every school library, the illustrations are gorgeous. Very helpful for projects on Asian cultures or Viet Nam.
Book Description
This classic of film criticism, long considered invaluable for its eloquent study of a problematic period in film history, is now substantially updated and revised by the author to include chapters beyond the Reagan era and into the twenty-first century. For the new edition, Robin Wood has written a substantial new preface that explores the interesting double context within which the book can be read-that in which it was written and that in which we find ourselves today. Among the other additions to this new edition are a celebration of modern "screwball" comedies like My Best Friend's Wedding, and an analysis of '90s American and Canadian teen movies in the vein of American Pie, Can't Hardly Wait, and Rollercoaster. Also included are a chapter on Hollywood today that looks at David Fincher and Jim Jarmusch (among others) and an illuminating essay on Day of the Dead.
Book Description
An antidote to the "Hanoi Jane" myth, the first account of the celebrated actress's antiwar activism.
Jane Fonda is important because she is a celebrity, and unimportant because she is a celebrity. She is a revolutionary who happens to be an actress, and a movie star who happens to be a revolutionary.—Rolling Stone, 1972
As the recent presidential campaign revealed, the Vietnam war remains a political lightning rod. In the 1980s, even as a Gallup poll listed Fonda as one of the most admired women in the country, "Hanoi Jane" had become a reviled figure among conservatives for her highly publicized trip to North Vietnam in 1972. Today, according to a recent poll, millions of Americans continue to link Fonda's name to Vietnam—yet the true history of her antiwar work has been largely obscured.
One of the most popular movie actresses of the 1960s and 1970s, Fonda was also among the most committed and visible antiwar activists of the era. Coming on the heels of Jane Fonda's own memoir, this is the first book to document one of the most interesting (and least known) chapters in Fonda's life—including the first comprehensive account of her controversial trips to Hanoi, as well as her extensive efforts on behalf of American GIs.
Based on unprecedented access to Fonda's twenty-foot-thick FBI files, interviews with the former POWs Fonda met with in Hanoi in 1972, and a broad range of contemporary press reports, Jane Fonda's War is a fascinating and little-understood chapter in the extraordinary life of an American icon. 20 black-and-white photographs.
Customer Reviews:
Left Wing Fantasy.......2007-06-01
Liberal sugarcoating--Filled with stretched truth and falsehoods. The author skillfully injects personal opinion and stretched truth to allude her conclusions as fact based on interviews with POWs. Much of the POW information [interviews with the former POWs Fonda met with in Hanoi in 1972] are self-interpreted, not exact quotation. Any versed POW historian using scholarly texts recognizes H's book as utter B.S.
On several accounts, H interjects "her" word "alleged" regarding torture of U.S. POWs [and no...F-tard, don't start spouting about Guantanamo or Abu G; combatants get better treatment than the Appalachian povert too far removed from society to even know about social programs.]
A reviewer writes, "America and the President are today proud to have Jane as a citizen, because she demonstrates, by her efforts, to bring a peaceful conclusion to current conflicts that so disrupt world harmony."
Question: Were hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese boat people fleeing communism, thousands of which died harmonious?
Question: Was the existence of the Khmer Rouge, supported by North Vietnam, resulting in millions dead in the Killing Fields harmonious?
Question: Joan Baez urged Fonda to protest NVN support of the Khmer Rouge....she chastised Baez for being critical of the Hanoi govt. Harmonious? I think not.
Question: After Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden's [sic] Indochina Peace Campaign [IPC] brought an end to U.S. financial support to the SVN govt. [post U.S. pullout] resulting in tens of thousands more South Vietnamese being imprisoned or murdered Harmonious?
Fonda Quote: "If you knew what communism truly was, you would get on your hands and knees and pray that one day we [U.S.] would be communist."
Harmonious--Communism has certainly worked well for millions of people. Too bad the dead tell no tales.
"Books have sprung up arguing that Fonda should be tried for treason." She should.
If you are trying to wrap your mind around the Vietnam era to include activism, and Fonda, as a VN War associated fixture, hunt elsewhere for an objective book, this one is not.
If you blab on and on about neocons, Christians, Republicans, and the right wing--this book is as much fantasy as Larry Potter and Lord of the Rings, defiantly buy it so you can continue to live in your jacked up, clouded little harmonious world that doesn't exist because people out there still want to kill, us and all that they can understand is the sword.
Mary Hershberger Spells It All Out.......2006-08-08
I enjoyed recreating Jane Fonda's antiwar activism during the Vietnam conflict that so divided our nation. Mary Hershberger's earlier book was at once a more generalized account of US liberals sojourning to Hanoi while the two countires were at war, and a much more academic book than this one, which really could be read alongside the Oscar winning actress' own memoirs MY LIFE SO FAR. I think Jane Fonda might have consulted Hershberger for help on some details because at this point it's plain that Hershberger, a Ohio history professor, knows more about what Jane was up to during those years than she does.
In retrospect it is astonishing that, with the weight of all the right wing press against her, Jane was able to make a comeback in the 1970s and 1980s in the movies, becoming one of the world's most popular film actresses. Even though her movies were sometimes preachy vehicles for her social pnilosophies, she was usually pretty good in them and two or three, from today's standpoint, are first-rate films no one should be ashamed of. However, as Hershberger points out, the invention of the internet was decidedly a blow for Fonda, as it has been used by innumerable right wing groups to spread lies about her activities in Hanoi and elsewhere.
To be fair, these rumors have some basis in reality, but often what started out as something good that Jane did was turned around and made into something evil. Thus the urban legend about the US POWs she was alleged to have met with, and then she asked them for their social security numbers, in the guise of helping them get out. In the 2006 version propulgated by hatemongers, Fonda "jeered at the POWs and then handed their pieces of paper to the Vietnamese guards. Again, the men were severely beaten until three of them died, leaving only the fourth one to tell the tale." Needless to say, this story is completely false. Books have sprung up arguing that Fonda should be tried for treason. It's insane.
Not to say she wasn't getting it from the Left the whole time, for the Godard-Gorin LETTER TO JANE is equally an appalling document, based on the fact that men think they can say anything bad about a woman and get away with it. Nasty little creeps.
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- The Glass Castle: A Memoir
- The Gospel According to Judas by Benjamin Iscariot
- The Harriet Lane Handbook: A Manual for Pediatric House Officers, 17th Edition
- The Invention of Hugo Cabret
- The Killer Angels
- The Mindbody Prescription: Healing the Body, Healing the Pain
- The Scalpel and the Silver Bear: The First Navajo Woman Surgeon Combines Western Medicine and Traditional Healing
- The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O'Neil's America
- The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed, Second Edition
- The Things They Carried
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