Short description
The shocking and harrowing account of one journalist's personal experience in the Vietnam war that is a now a cult classic.
Long description
'The best book I have ever read on men and war in our time.' John Le Carre '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
Review
An indispensable account of the Vietnam War, first published 20 years ago. The book has lost none of its angry eloquence, and its depiction of the brutality, boredom and, yes, glamour of war belongs in the first rank of reportage. All the barbarous surrealism of that television-war is here; the pill-popping reconnaissance patrollers; the journalists sipping Martinis on a Saigon rooftop while they watch the bombs fall; the spooked humour of men ready to be killed. Above all, this is one man's personal record of his losing battle to save his soul. (Kirkus UK)