The NYT Book Review asked a few writers for war books "they find particularly illuminating." Here’s Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton and author of “A New World Order,” on Michael Herr’s Dispatches:
"With intensity so strong I can almost smell and feel the jungles of Vietnam, Herr chronicles the brutality and boredom of war without intermediation, redeeming glory, medals or even a belief in a cause."
Maybe it’s a bit of wishful thinking, but the omission of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, and, most recently, Jon Lee Anderson’s The Fall of Baghdad dims the list. That, and no mention of The Quiet American by Graham Greene.
A good idea for the Book Review, but one that seems too much like the editor at the last minute, flipping through the Times’ Rolodex for a feature.
Why The Quiet American? Here:
Down we went again, away from the gnarled and fissured forest towards the river, flattening out over the neglected ricefields, aimed like a bullet at one small sampan on the yellow stream. The cannon gave a single burst of tracer, and the sampan blew apart in a shower of sparks: we didn’t even wait to see our victims struggling to survive, but climbed and made for home. I thought again as I had thought when I saw the dead child at Phat Diem, ‘I hate war.’ There had been something so shocking in our sudden fortuitous choice of a prey—we had just happened to be passing, one burst only was required, there was no one to return our fire, we were gone again, adding our little quota to the world’s dead.
