Thomas E. Barden is Professor of English and Dean of the Honors College at the University of Toledo, USA.
Steinbeck in Vietnam contains some vivid descriptions of the
fierceness of American firepower, the hazards of night combat and
the beauty of the Vietnamese countryside. It also reflects the
scorn that many 'hawks' and 'doves' had for one another, with
Steinbeck critical of the anti-war protesters as stupid and
cowardly.... Steinbeck spent a good deal of time in the field, and
wrote about the bravery of helicopter pilots in the air and of the
multiple dangers -- not just hostile gunfire, but also snakes,
malaria and tripwire explosives -- faced by infantry on the ground.
Barden notes, however, that Steinbeck was escorted by high-ranking
officers everywhere he went and mainly saw what they wanted him to
see.... Steinbeck came home to Sag Harbor and died of heart failure
a year later, but not before reversing himself almost completely.
While he did no more public writing about Vietnam (or anything
else), he is known to have spent his last months privately
questioning both the execution and legitimacy of the war."--
"Newsday"
[O]pinions that viscerally reflect the deep political chasm that
the war created in America. Steinbeck's writing is vividly
descriptive, evoking place and circumstance.... [His] ability to
capture the day-to-day conduct of the war and its destructive force
is sometimes shockingly immediate.-- "Publishers Weekly"
[Steinbeck's] dispatches reflect his initial excitement over the
weaponry (e.g., the AC-47 gunship, known as Puff the Magic Dragon)
and the heroic American soldiers standing against communism, but he
gradually came to see the mismatch between the American narrative
and the reality that most Vietnamese just wanted the war to end. By
the time he left Asia, readers can sense disillusion and a feeling
that the soldiers were in an unwinnable situation.... This personal
look at a contentious moment in American history will supplement
Vietnam War collections and reward any student who wishes to better
understand the times.-- "Library Journal"
Barden (English, Univ. of Toledo) makes available in one book the
last writings of the novelist John Steinbeck, who traveled to
Vietnam and wrote columns about the war for Newsday, the Long
Island newspaper. The editor provides a smart introduction and a
well-argued afterword. He credibly maintains that Steinbeck evolved
from hawk to dove during the time he spent in-country starting in
December 1966.... Highly recommended.-- "CHOICE"
Barden provides an illuminating introduction and afterward to a
gut-wrenching chronicle by Steinbeck about America's experience
there.... Steinbeck in Vietnam captures the confusion and pain of
that time in deeply emotional and personal prose. It also shows
Steinbeck at his most conflicted. His Nobel-worthy work often
questioned how the American knight errant had lost track of the
enemy and the cause. In these pages he tells a large part of that
story.-- "Rain Taxi"
Between December 1966 and May 1967, Steinbeck filed pieces that
sought to support the U.S. effort in Vietnam, to lionize the
soldiers whom he met (and with whom he occasionally ducked incoming
rounds), to expose the dimensions of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese
violence against civilians, to chide the liberal media for
ingesting without question the enemy's propaganda and to urge other
writers (he names Updike, Williams, Bellow, Albee and Miller) to
travel to Vietnam to see the war firsthand.... Steinbeck's
positions later softened, but not in the pages of Newsday.--
"Kirkus"
Decades after he penned the enduring literary classics Of Mice and
Men and The Grapes of Wrath, 64-year-old John Steinbeck traveled to
Vietnam in December 1966 to write about the war raging there.
Steinbeck spent five months among the troops and sent back dozens
of dispatches, which were published as a series of letters in
Newsday and haven't been fully reprinted until now. In the new book
Steinbeck in Vietnam: Dispatches From the War, scholar Thomas
Barden collects all of the author's accounts, which constitute
hislast published writings before his death in 1968. While
Steinbeck publicly expressed his support for the war and was
criticized for it, his private feelings were more conflicted, says
Barden, a dean and professor of English at the University of Toledo
in Ohio.-- "U.S. News Weekly"
From December 1966 to May 1967, the Nobel Prize-winning author,
with weapon in hand and pens and notepads stuffed in fatigue
pockets, had slogged through the combat zones of South Vietnam. His
closing words, filed from Tokyo on May 20, 1967, constitute one of
the finest tributes ever made to the Americans who fought in the
controversial conflict.... Steinbeck's extraordinary gifts as a
writer and genius for observation give readers a profoundly
accurate picture of the war during his time in country.-- "Daily
Progress"
If you collect John Steinbeck's writing or pride yourself on having
read all of the author's work, you'll have to get this book. Not
only are these dispatches quite readable, they also give an
interesting insignt into the war as Steinbeck saw and experienced
it.-- "theCalifornian.com"
Reading Steinbeck in Vietnam is a fascinating, occasionally
uncomfortable experience.... Written with the force that
characterizes all of Steinbeck's work, his Vietnam dispatches are a
mixture of vitriolic attacks on war protestors, lyrical
descriptions of the countryside, paeans to the American soldier and
moments of stunning insight. What makes the columns more than a
historical curiosity is Steinbeck's effort to understand the war on
its own terms. That internal struggle, publicly shared in the pages
of Newsday, is as powerful an evocation of the Vietnam experience
as Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried.Literary scholar Thomas E.
Barden's editorial touch is light and clearly defined. His
introduction and afterword place the letters in the context of
Steinbeck's career, including his later doubts about the war.--
"Shelf Awareness"
Steinbeck was a vocal supporter of the Vietnam War despite serious
misgivings that he kept quiet, as is made clear in a comprehensive
new collection of his reporting on the conflict, 'Steinbeck in
Vietnam: Dispatches From the War' edited by Thomas E. Barden.--
"New York Times"
These dispatches are really the last work that Steinbeck published,
and they are intensely interesting pieces of writing. Their
vividness alone makes them worth reading. The letters are
impressionistic, and they often contain excellent reportage,
showing readers what the war looked like from the ground. They
remind us once again that Steinbeck's gift was essentially
journalistic.--Jay Parini, Middlebury College, author of John
Steinbeck: A Biography
Though John Steinbeck is best known for chronicling the woes of the
Great Depression, his raw, journalistic accounts of later human
tragedies are written with the same poignancy as The Grapes of
Wrath and Of Mice and Men. In Steinbeck in Vietnam, we are offered
glimpses of the author's last works.-- "Huffington Post"
Unless some undiscovered manuscript is uncovered, this will
probably be the final book of Salinas native son John Steinbeck's
work to be published.... If you collect John Steinbeck's writing or
pride yourself on having read all of the author's work, you'll have
to get this book.-- "The Salinas Californian"
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