Review by Choice Review
In this elegantly written book, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Nguyen (The Sympathizer, 2015) offers a comprehensive, balanced analysis of how the Vietnam War has been remembered and forgotten--both privately and collectively. Arguing for a complex ethics of memory, Nguyen (English and American studies and ethnicity, Univ. of Southern California) forgets none of the sides involved in the war, detailing how the war was troubling and traumatic for both Americans and Vietnamese, populations that he takes pains to show are ethnically and ideologically diverse. The author insists that the war affected not only Americans and Vietnamese but also South Koreans, Laotians, Cambodians, and other Southeast Asian Americans. For Nguyen, art is crucial to the ethical work of producing just memory. Examining a medley of cultural forms--novels, monuments, cemeteries, souvenirs, video games, photography, museum exhibits, and movies--Nguyen calls attention to the inequality in the industrial production of memory and to the power of art to disable future wars. One of the book's most original--and perhaps controversial--arguments is that to avoid simplifying the other, people need to recognize both their humanity and their ever-present inhumanity and those of others as well. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. --Yen Le Espiritu, University of California San Diego
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Nguyen's debut novel, The Sympathizer (2015), a complex tale of the Vietnam War, garnered the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and landed on more than two dozen best-of-the-year lists. Readers will discover the roots of Nguyen's powerful fiction in this profoundly incisive and bracing investigation into the memory of war and how war stories are shaped and disseminated. I was born in Vietnam but made in America, states Nguyen, establishing the axis from which he astutely analyzes each country's diametrically opposed experience of the war fought in his homeland and, on a universal level, the ethical aspects of who is remembered and who is forgotten. He recalibrates our perceptions of American might in his adept dissection of the industrialization of memory by the military-Hollywood-video-game complex that so indelibly dehumanizes the enemy and justifies and glorifies war. As Nguyen conducts deep immersions in art, film, and literature (with an invaluable look at Vietnamese and Vietnamese American works); visits war memorials in the U.S., Vietnam, and Cambodia; and illuminates the lives of Vietnamese refugees in America, he gauges the impact of creative opposition to the war machine. Ultimately, Nguyen's lucid, arresting, and richly sourced inquiry, in the mode of Susan Sontag and W. G. Sebald, is a call for true and just stories of war and its perpetual legacy.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Vietnam-born, American-raised Nguyen (The Sympathizer), an associate professor of English and American Studies at the University of Southern California, sifts through the many guises of memory and identity in this eloquent, scholarly narrative of the Vietnam War's psychological impact on combatants and civilians. The Vietnamese who fled the battlefields have little choice but to be known by the carnage that brought them to the U.S. They grapple with their own painful memories, which shadow them or get pushed aside, while their descendants try to cope with elders refusing to share their recollections. Nguyen peruses death and destruction from multiple vantage points, including the killing caves where Vietnamese civilians were annihilated by American bombers and the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. But this is primarily a work that comes to grips with memory and identity through the arts. Where literature and film have long been dominated by American works, Nguyen brilliantly introduces a pantheon of artists, including directors Dang Nhat Minh and Bui Thac Chuyen, and writers Le Ly Hayslip and Monique Truong. This is a difficult but rewarding read; Nguyen succeeds in delivering a potent critique of the war and revealing what the memories of living have meant for the identities of the next generation. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Library Journal Review
What does it mean to remember a war? Nguyen (English, Univ. of Southern California; The Sympathizer) explores this question through a critical analysis of the films, literature, cemeteries, statues, video games, etc. that memorialize the Vietnam War in the United States, Vietnam, and elsewhere. The author points out that America's recollection of the conflict is more familiar around the world in large part because the country's movie industry has global reach, which is not the case for Vietnam. Nguyen argues that the military-industrial complex has learned the wrong lessons from this war-that victories are not necessary to perpetuate a battle's existence. He advocates "just memory," which includes (among other things) the ability to see both the humanity and inhumanity in ourselves and others as a way to redress this. The author also examines how the conflict is recalled by Vietnamese Americans, South Koreans, Hmong, and others. VERDICT This thought-provoking book is recommended for all students of the Vietnam War and those interested in historical memory. For a work that focuses more exclusively on U.S. memory, see Patrick Hagopian's The Vietnam War in American Memory.-Joshua Wallace, Ranger Coll., TX © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A scholarly exploration of memory and the Vietnam War from an author "born in Vietnam but made in America." While Nguyen (English and American Studies Ethnicity/Univ. of Southern California; The Sympathizer, 2015, etc.) focuses on the Vietnam War, the war that most intimately affected his Vietnamese family, his fine reflections on how to treat and preserve the memory of war "justly" extends to other neighboring wars such as those in Cambodia, Laos, Korea, the Philippines, and elsewhere. The "ethics of remembering" is complicated, as the author explains while walking readers through specific parts of Vietnam, because it involves not just grieving one's nearest and deareste.g., visiting cemeteries of fallen family membersbut feeling compassion for others, as the moving, reflective black wall of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., elicits beautifully. Nguyen stresses the importance of recognizing that we are not only the victims of horrible tragedy, but also the perpetrators: "Reminding ourselves that being human also means being inhuman is important simply because it is so easy to forget our inhumanity or to displace it onto other humans." The author also explores the "memory industries," such as Hollywood movies that cater to "young men's erotic fascination with pure sex and war movies." He looks at many examples of war memorials in Vietnam and Korea that attempt to bring the memory into the present, while books, especially novels by Vietnamese-Americans, convey senses of affirmation and redemption and allow the ghosts, literally, to speak. Grasping our essential inhumanity through art (a "true war story"), Nguyen affirms, is one way to resist the "memory industry," the ultimate goal of which is to "reproduce power and inequality." Finally, there is the role of "just" forgetting, which allows people to go on and live as well as to forgive. Essentially a critical study, Nguyen's work is a powerful reflection on how we choose to remember and forget. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
