Patriots - by Christian G Appy (Paperback)

About the Book

In this monumental oral history of the Vietnam War, Appy probes the war's path through both the United States and Vietnam--allowing readers to see and feel what this war really meant to people on all sides.

Book Synopsis

"Intense and absorbing... If you buy only one book on the Vietnam War, this is the one you want." -Chicago Tribune

Christian G. Appy's monumental oral history of the Vietnam War is the first work to probe the war's path through both the United States and Vietnam. These vivid testimonies of 135 men and women span the entire history of the Vietnam conflict, from its murky origins in the 1940s to the chaotic fall of Saigon in 1975. Sometimes detached and reflective, often raw and emotional, they allow us to see and feel what this war meant to people literally on all sides: Americans and Vietnamese, generals and grunts, policymakers and protesters, guerrillas and CIA operatives, pilots and doctors, artists and journalists, and a variety of ordinary citizens whose lives were swept up in a cataclysm that killed three million people. By turns harrowing, inspiring, and revelatory, Patriots is not a chronicle of facts and figures but a vivid human history of the war.

"A gem of a book, as informative and compulsively readable as it is timely." -The Washington Post Book World

Review Quotes

Intense and absorbing... If you buy only one book on the Vietnam War, this is the one you want. (Chicago Tribune)

A gem of a book, as informative and compulsively readable as it is timely. (The Washington Post Book World)

About the Author

Christian G. Appy is a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the author of two previous books on the Vietnam War. His oral history of the war, Patriots, was a main selection of Book of the Month Club and won the Massachusetts Book Award for nonfiction. His most recent book is American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity. He lives in Amherst.