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thealpacalypse's review against another edition
5.0
Deeply thought-provoking work. I recommend that anywho who reads or teaches history read this book as well.
mangocats's review against another edition
4.0
so so so incredibly well researched and Nguyen possesses such a strong and nuanced command of words. he will wring a concept dry (in a good way) and produce such a thorough and diverse conversation for the readers to engage with. i appreciated how he recognized the inhumanity of vietnam as well, and its harmful military activity in other southeast asian countries.
i read a review that found his book to be verbose and repetitive, which i agree with. i understand that he wrote this book around the relationship btwn memory and war, but sometimes i feel like he was talking just to talk lol. like it was so dense at times i couldn’t understand where he was going with it.
another banger from Nguyen
i read a review that found his book to be verbose and repetitive, which i agree with. i understand that he wrote this book around the relationship btwn memory and war, but sometimes i feel like he was talking just to talk lol. like it was so dense at times i couldn’t understand where he was going with it.
another banger from Nguyen
lisaxdf's review against another edition
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
5.0
archytas's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.25
"This invocation of Vietnam as quagmire, syndrome, and war speaks neither to Vietnamese reality nor to current difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan. It speaks to American fear. Americans think defeat in these wars is the worst thing, when winning in Iraq and Afghanistan today only means more of the same tomorrow: Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen, and so on. This is the most important reason for Americans to remember what they call the Vietnam War, the fact that it was one conflict in a long line of horrific wars that came before it and after it. This war’s identity—and, indeed, any war’s identity—cannot be extricated from the identity of war itself."
Nguyen is a thoughtful and compelling writer - one of my favourite writers - so this is always an engaging and provoking read. He is a novelist capable of visceral, emotional, hilarious and delicate fiction, but here he displays his academic credentials with analytical and precise language. Nevertheless, or because, simply because of this, I have a lot of complicated thoughts and feelings about this book, which may take 'some time to sort out. Possibly starting with the central contention that the Vietnam-US war can more be analysed as an entity of war than as a specific conflict about particular power and ideological ideas. While I get that, I also feel as if something is lost in the process.
It feels as if Nguyen is writing for an audience who have grown up with Vietnam as code for war, and it made me examine my own context a bit more. I grew up alongside kids born in Vietnam, who had lived most of their lives as refugees in one place or another. I knew Vietnam as a place, and as a civil war long before I understood it as a war dragged out by the US and Australia. I also grew up alongside kids born in Cambodia, most related to Vietnamese, who had lost parents to Pol Pot's killing fields and took a different view on the North Vietnamese government. Of specifics as a kid I understood little, but I knew that what was happening and had happened in those countries was big, and complicated, and hard. And that the hold it had on my friends was different to the hold it had on their parents, but different was not lesser. As I got older, I met North Vietnamese youth, with another different range of beliefs and perspectives.
By the time I saw Apocolypse Now I was a young adult, and hated the way it used Vietnam as the background to a US story, just like the military used the country as a pawn for its own interests. (the machismo probably didn't help). So I struggle with the idea that this war is somehow reducible to something less complex, or less lived. And those ideas, which mattered a great deal to my friends' parents just as they did to the huge numbers who fought, feel like an essential part of the story.
Nguyen here delves into various pop culture and cultural forms of memory keeping to interrogate how the war is enshrined and reinterpreted. This includes, of course, Coppola's epic but also fiction and non-fiction by US writers and Vietnamese diaspora writers. There is less coverage by authors from post-war Vietnam, but there is an extensive section on the war tourism and museum memory industry inside Vietnam. I did feel, possibly unfairly, that the perspectives of Vietnamese who supported the revolution were given less space than other perspectives, but that may be unfair. Certainly, Nguyen argues strongly and persuasively for the importance of allowing space for all memories, for not fossilzing 'flattening' memory into neat stories. It is this quality which draws me so strongly to Nguyen's writing, I think, his capacity to hold multiple perspectives and honour them. He also notes the problems of denied voice to those without English:
"While those who live in what the scholar Werner Sollors calls a “multilingual America” speak and write many languages, America as a whole, the America that rules, prides itself on trenchant monolingualism. As a result, the immigrant, the refugee, the exile, and the stranger can be heard in high volume only in their own homes and in the enclaves they carve out for themselves. Outside those ethnic walls, facing an indifferent America, the other struggles to speak. She clears her throat, hesitates and, most often, waits for the next generation raised or born on American soil to speak for them. Vietnamese American literature written in English follows this ethnic cycle of silence to speech. In that way, Vietnamese American literature fulfills ethnic writing’s most basic function: to serve as proof that regardless of what brought these others to America, they or their children have become accepted, even if grudgingly, by other Americans. "
The book which shoots off in many directions, Nguyen less troubled by trying to push a forceful argument than by following the threads of what he knows to be real and then examining where that takes us. Some parts are just so pithily put, that feeling that you have always known this just as it probably never seemed so clear.
And in the end, the book matters a great deal as a reminder that, just as the 'truth' is not one thing about this war, it is also never one thing about our present - a warning that feels particularly important in an era where being in a camp can feel like a substitute for self examination of the impact of our actions. For this alone, the book is worth being widely read.
"We must continue to look at the horrors done by humans like him if we are to learn anything, if we are to imagine not just a hopeful utopian future but also an alternate dystopian one where, if the Khmer Rouge had succeeded, Duch would not be a devil but an angel. This would force us to ask whether those we imagine as angels today are not simply triumphant devils who have written their own stories, in the manner of so many bomb-launching bureaucrats and elected officials with ghostwritten memoirs."
Nguyen is a thoughtful and compelling writer - one of my favourite writers - so this is always an engaging and provoking read. He is a novelist capable of visceral, emotional, hilarious and delicate fiction, but here he displays his academic credentials with analytical and precise language. Nevertheless, or because, simply because of this, I have a lot of complicated thoughts and feelings about this book, which may take 'some time to sort out. Possibly starting with the central contention that the Vietnam-US war can more be analysed as an entity of war than as a specific conflict about particular power and ideological ideas. While I get that, I also feel as if something is lost in the process.
It feels as if Nguyen is writing for an audience who have grown up with Vietnam as code for war, and it made me examine my own context a bit more. I grew up alongside kids born in Vietnam, who had lived most of their lives as refugees in one place or another. I knew Vietnam as a place, and as a civil war long before I understood it as a war dragged out by the US and Australia. I also grew up alongside kids born in Cambodia, most related to Vietnamese, who had lost parents to Pol Pot's killing fields and took a different view on the North Vietnamese government. Of specifics as a kid I understood little, but I knew that what was happening and had happened in those countries was big, and complicated, and hard. And that the hold it had on my friends was different to the hold it had on their parents, but different was not lesser. As I got older, I met North Vietnamese youth, with another different range of beliefs and perspectives.
By the time I saw Apocolypse Now I was a young adult, and hated the way it used Vietnam as the background to a US story, just like the military used the country as a pawn for its own interests. (the machismo probably didn't help). So I struggle with the idea that this war is somehow reducible to something less complex, or less lived. And those ideas, which mattered a great deal to my friends' parents just as they did to the huge numbers who fought, feel like an essential part of the story.
Nguyen here delves into various pop culture and cultural forms of memory keeping to interrogate how the war is enshrined and reinterpreted. This includes, of course, Coppola's epic but also fiction and non-fiction by US writers and Vietnamese diaspora writers. There is less coverage by authors from post-war Vietnam, but there is an extensive section on the war tourism and museum memory industry inside Vietnam. I did feel, possibly unfairly, that the perspectives of Vietnamese who supported the revolution were given less space than other perspectives, but that may be unfair. Certainly, Nguyen argues strongly and persuasively for the importance of allowing space for all memories, for not fossilzing 'flattening' memory into neat stories. It is this quality which draws me so strongly to Nguyen's writing, I think, his capacity to hold multiple perspectives and honour them. He also notes the problems of denied voice to those without English:
"While those who live in what the scholar Werner Sollors calls a “multilingual America” speak and write many languages, America as a whole, the America that rules, prides itself on trenchant monolingualism. As a result, the immigrant, the refugee, the exile, and the stranger can be heard in high volume only in their own homes and in the enclaves they carve out for themselves. Outside those ethnic walls, facing an indifferent America, the other struggles to speak. She clears her throat, hesitates and, most often, waits for the next generation raised or born on American soil to speak for them. Vietnamese American literature written in English follows this ethnic cycle of silence to speech. In that way, Vietnamese American literature fulfills ethnic writing’s most basic function: to serve as proof that regardless of what brought these others to America, they or their children have become accepted, even if grudgingly, by other Americans. "
The book which shoots off in many directions, Nguyen less troubled by trying to push a forceful argument than by following the threads of what he knows to be real and then examining where that takes us. Some parts are just so pithily put, that feeling that you have always known this just as it probably never seemed so clear.
And in the end, the book matters a great deal as a reminder that, just as the 'truth' is not one thing about this war, it is also never one thing about our present - a warning that feels particularly important in an era where being in a camp can feel like a substitute for self examination of the impact of our actions. For this alone, the book is worth being widely read.
"We must continue to look at the horrors done by humans like him if we are to learn anything, if we are to imagine not just a hopeful utopian future but also an alternate dystopian one where, if the Khmer Rouge had succeeded, Duch would not be a devil but an angel. This would force us to ask whether those we imagine as angels today are not simply triumphant devils who have written their own stories, in the manner of so many bomb-launching bureaucrats and elected officials with ghostwritten memoirs."
pamiverson's review against another edition
4.0
Thought-provoking book exploring how we understand War. Looks at the Vietnam War (or as it is called in Vietnam, the American War) from a variety of angles (I didn't know anything about South Korean involvement). Uses art of various types produced by those impacted and those reflecting on it from different perspectives. Often he was talking about movies and books I don't know, so I was a bit at a loss on some of it. His role as a university professor was apparent.
Key passages I want to remember: "the need for a powerful memory to fight war and find peace;" "justice requires a face-to-face dialogue."
This has changed how I will experience Vietnam when we go there...
Key passages I want to remember: "the need for a powerful memory to fight war and find peace;" "justice requires a face-to-face dialogue."
This has changed how I will experience Vietnam when we go there...
an_library_stan's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.25
Not a quick read, but very informative.
There were parts where I felt like Nguyen was exploring dualities so much that I got lost, or wanted him to just take a stance already. But of course this is my discomfort with the lack of easy answers for what war is and how it implicates everyone involved.
I'm not sure what will stick with me most from this book. Certainly the critique of a lot of war films, and mainstream narratives about Vietnam (e.g. the things they carried) resonated. People pointing at gaps and biases in my education stays with me. Likewise there were some well known quotes and cultural landmarks Nguyen clarified. The books title is a Toni Morrison quote. Night of the living dead is a direct allegory for America's war in Vietnam. "Freedom is not free" comes from an MLK (essay?, speech?) condemning segregation and critiquing domestic imperialism.
The chapter On Asymmetry has some really powerful quotes. It wasn't as challenging to me as the rest of the book, because it pointed fingers at Power and the Powerful. Other parts of the book reached more for our universal humanity and inhumanity and sometimes felt like relativism. Some quotes:
There were parts where I felt like Nguyen was exploring dualities so much that I got lost, or wanted him to just take a stance already. But of course this is my discomfort with the lack of easy answers for what war is and how it implicates everyone involved.
I'm not sure what will stick with me most from this book. Certainly the critique of a lot of war films, and mainstream narratives about Vietnam (e.g. the things they carried) resonated. People pointing at gaps and biases in my education stays with me. Likewise there were some well known quotes and cultural landmarks Nguyen clarified. The books title is a Toni Morrison quote. Night of the living dead is a direct allegory for America's war in Vietnam. "Freedom is not free" comes from an MLK (essay?, speech?) condemning segregation and critiquing domestic imperialism.
The chapter On Asymmetry has some really powerful quotes. It wasn't as challenging to me as the rest of the book, because it pointed fingers at Power and the Powerful. Other parts of the book reached more for our universal humanity and inhumanity and sometimes felt like relativism. Some quotes:
Is there anything more asymmetrical than air war waged against those without an air force, or a people forced to make a living by selling the fragments of those bombs to those who bombed them? (179)
Killing is the weapon of the strong. Dying is the weapon of the week. It is not that the weak cannot kill; it is only that their greatest strength lies in their capacity to die in greater numbers than the strong... The American war machine ran aground on the bodies of its own men as well as the bodies of those it killed. With the specter of the Vietnamese body count mobilizing global opposition (156-157)
He covers so much in this book. The brutal role Koreans played in Vietnam, learning from and dependent on the US after the Korean war.
As anthropologist Heonik Kwon notes, this behavior by Korean troops was hardly surprising. Their slogans included "kill clean, burn clean, destroy clean," children also spy " and "better to make mistakes than to miss." (151)
The difficulty of telling the story of a people as a single minority artist living in the US. How so many Vietnamese writers and storytellers and artists are not peasants, who were most impacted by the war. How winners and losers in wars try to tell the most morally pure story about themselves. How even though it's now in the mainstream to critique US military involvement in Vietnam, it's more about how the US went about the occupation and less about US imperialism writ large. So we can now feel good that Vietnam is a capitalist country like the US. The ultimate ideology of capitalist democracy won out. And so the US's wars in the middle east are justified, even if, again, the US didn't _quite_ get it right, the broader white man's burden (also discussed in the book) remains Right.
Last thing I will say is I got a lot of books and movies from this book that I want to read / watch. Nguyen lists, quotes and paraphrases works of art and documentation that tell many more stories than we get in Forrest Gump, The things they carried, and apocalypse now.
rencordings's review against another edition
3.0
Overall, I think this work is well-researched with nuanced elucidation that considers the transnationality of the concepts and frameworks discussed in the argument. I like how Viet Thanh Nguyen unpacks prominent similarities of the memory industry in both the US and Vietnam and, to a lesser extent, other relevant Southeast Asian countries, alongside a rich usage of various thinkers. It's a dense book, but the dynamic perspectives and lucid examples he utilizes play a constructive role in helping the central ideas come across.
However, I do feel like he's trying to do too much in one book. Each chapter can be its own book, which means each chapter feels both packed and glossed over at the same time, despite his masterful and meticulous craftsmanship to accessibly deliver highly complicated thoughts. I think he makes up for it by weaving in his personal experiences here and there, but I kind of wish he would do less of it. I'm not saying he shouldn't have a say in a book about his war, but when it comes to a book discussing the ethics of war memories and memory production, the author's occasional snark remarks feel a bit off-putting to me, as if he's the one who has the moral high ground in the discussion-which is quite an ironic self-contradiction.
However, I do feel like he's trying to do too much in one book. Each chapter can be its own book, which means each chapter feels both packed and glossed over at the same time, despite his masterful and meticulous craftsmanship to accessibly deliver highly complicated thoughts. I think he makes up for it by weaving in his personal experiences here and there, but I kind of wish he would do less of it. I'm not saying he shouldn't have a say in a book about his war, but when it comes to a book discussing the ethics of war memories and memory production, the author's occasional snark remarks feel a bit off-putting to me, as if he's the one who has the moral high ground in the discussion-which is quite an ironic self-contradiction.
ellephuonglinhnguyen's review against another edition
4.0
When it comes to war, the basic dialectic of memory and amnesia is thus not only about remembering and forgetting certain events or people. The basic dialectic of memory and amnesia is instead more fundamentally about remembering our humanity and forgetting our inhumanity, while conversely remembering the inhumanity of others and forgetting their humanity. A just memory demands instead a final step in the dialectics of ethical memory—not just the movement between an ethics of remembering one's own and remembering others, but also a shift toward an ethics of recognition, of seeing and remembering how the inhuman inhabits the human. Any project of the humanities, such as this one, should thus also be a project of the inhumanities, of how civilizations are built on forgotten barbarism toward others, of how the heart of darkness beats within. No wonder, then, that for Jorge Luis Borges, remembering is a ghostly verb. Memory is haunted, not just by ghostly others but by the horrors we have done, seen, and condoned, or by the unspeakable things from which we have profited. The troubling weight of the past is especially evident when we speak of war and our limited ability to recall it. Haunted and haunting, human and inhuman, war remains with us and within us, impossible to forget but difficult to remember.