Dispatches (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics)
by Michael Herr
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Book Summary Information
Author: Michael HerrIntroduction: Robert Stone
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Deckle Edge
Published: 2009-02-17
ISBN: 0307270807
Number of pages: 296
Publisher: Everyman's Library
Book Reviews of Dispatches (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics)
Book Review: A Unique Achievement in Writing about War
Summary: 5 Stars
A Unique Achievement in Writing about War
The first and most important thing to say about Michael Herr's "Dispatches" is that it difficult to begin to do him justice; by its very nature, praise is comparison and Dispatches is incomparable: when you talk about Dispatches, praise is not praise enough.
A memoir of war-reporting written from the left-wing-peacenik perspective, Dispatches is like no other book and the world knows it credentialing it with reference and imitation.
John LeCarre gave it superlatives, Salman Rushdie quoted it in a speech; scenes from it are the basis of scenes in several of the most successful movies about the Vietnam War and, when one former soldier from the Soviet Union during it's occupation of Afghanistan wanted to write about the soldiers on the ground that his country put there, he used ideas and language garnered directly from reading Dispatches.
Among the things that are most striking about Dispatches are its truth, its depth and Herr's raw talent for transforming experience into a digestible, relatable experience that is so rich and so deep that the reader is filled with a sense of the writer's truth on both the large and the small scale; whether he was talking about the history of the war and our involvement in it
"it was spookwar then, adventure; not exactly soldiers, not even advisors yet, but Irregualrs, working in remote places under little direct authority, acting out their fantasies with more freedom than most men ever know.... hot on the sex-and-death trail, "lost to headquarters."
or about the men on the ground, the actual soldiers, who were an amalgam of every human feeling. They were lost, lonely and lethal--but sometimes, some of them could be kind and caring beyond words
"Take your pills, baby, a medic in Can Tho told me. "Big orange ones every week, little white ones every day, and don't miss a day whatever you do. They got strains over here that could waste a heavy-set fella like you in a week."
or of subjective experience lived inside a savage, inescapable now
"Or dozing and waking under mosquito netting in a mess of slick sweat, gagging for air that wasn't 99 percent moisture, one clean breath to dry-sluice your anxiety and the backwater smell of your own body. But all you got and all there was were misty clots of air that corroded your appetite and burned your eyes and make your cigarettes taste like swollen insects rolled up and smoked alive, crackling and wet."
That last sentence is the mark of Herr's real genius: his voice.
Herr's voice in Dispatches is something that every writer, would kill for: pure golden music wedded to an intensity of focused purpose that says "war" more effectively than a thousand words of battle description would.
Herr's writing is the true poetry of a war that was unlike any previous war in the American experience; one that had left behind the idea of steeling yourself for battle and facing death in a way that would rush in like the tide, go on for a time and then recede. Herr's voice was the voice of someone on a regular military's side of guerilla war; of being surrounded by the real and constant possibility of dying by surprise, dying before you were ready; by ambush or by booby trap or sniper shot, or simply putting your foot down on the wrong six-inches of unknown ground.
Herr sets feeling to the rhythms of his gift so well, with sentences so full of twists, turns and afterthoughts, that you're carried along and you wonder if it isn't all some sort of magic trick: you wonder if Herr could have sat down one day at a desk to describe pink tissue paper, closely, precisely and in a way that would make you want to run screaming...
Dispatches is not a good book, it is not a great book, it is unique and everyone who wants to read and feel should read it.
It is one of the few books of its time and subject matter that withstands multiple readings and if you are reading it for the first time, you're lucky because it might very well change your conception of reading: you will never have read it before and there will be many, many things afterwards that you will never read the same way again.
Summary of Dispatches (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics)
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Written on the front lines in Vietnam, Dispatches became an immediate classic of war reportage when it was published in 1977.
From its terrifying opening pages to its final eloquent words, Dispatches makes us see, in unforgettable and unflinching detail, the chaos and fervor of the war and the surreal insanity of life in that singular combat zone. Michael Herr?s unsparing, unorthodox retellings of the day-to-day events in Vietnam take on the force of poetry, rendering clarity from one of the most incomprehensible and nightmarish events of our time.
Dispatches is among the most blistering and compassionate accounts of war in our literature.
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 theater of combat ever fought, as well as the flavor 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, The Sorrow of War, We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young--but Herr's book was the first to hit the target head-on and remains a classic.
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