A review by archytas
A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial by Viet Thanh Nguyen

informative reflective slow-paced

4.0

Nguyen hooks the reader quickly into this carefully structured cross between memoir and autobiography. Written in the second person, the voice serves to draw the reader deeper into empathy while also allowing Nguyen to create distance between his authorial and subject voices. But it is the musing, reflective, style - sweeping from his perspective to imagining others, and carefully trying to generalise from his own experiences to global ones, while always emphasising his own subjectivity, that makes this such a pleasure. In the end it reads like hanging with someone really interesting who has a lot to say, and that's worth listening to.