Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
64
result(s) for
"Vietnam History Fiction."
Sort by:
And the Sparrow Fell
And the Sparrow Fellis a coming-of-age tale set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. Former U.S. Congressman Robert J. Mrazek tells the story of a wealthy family on the north shore of Long Island in the spring of 1967. Cornell undergraduate Rick Ledbetter goes through a rocky journey of self-discovery as both his family and his country disintegrate around him. Rick is a young rake in the mold of his father, Travis Ledbetter, a Medal of Honor-winning World War II navy pilot. Rick has been accepted into the swift boat program at Naval Officer Candidate School and will be heading for combat in Vietnam.
Rick's brother Tom, also a Cornell undergraduate, is a young man of true conscience who, because of his Christian faith, is morally opposed to the war. He has rejected conscientious-objector status. Rick meets and falls in love with Kate Kurshan, who is Tom's girlfriend. She is also a Cornell student who opposes the war. Their three lives intersect as Rick, who becomes a war hero, discovers the human cost of war, while Tom, who has great moral courage, puts his life on the line in protest of the Vietnam War at a terrible personal cost.
eBook
Escape from communist heaven
The communist takeover of South Vietnam in 1975 is very hard for Viet Nguyen, fourteen, and his family but when Viet foolishly tries to speed up their plans to escape he is arrested and sentenced to the harsh life of a labor camp in the jungle.
Book
Drift
Abstract The maritime refugee subject is constituted through the mobility of drift. This article interprets the representation of drift mobilities in Nam Le's 2008 story, “The Boat,” lê thi diem thúy's 2003 novel The Gangster We Are All Looking For, and Ocean Vuong's 2019 novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. It argues that these Vietnamese diasporic writers reinvent the image of “boat people,” severing it from its imperial past and authoring a new politics of belonging to oceanic movement. Le, lê and Vuong use representations of drift and maritime migration to challenge dominant post-war mobility narratives constituting a liberal subject of freedom. In the process, they reveal diasporic imaginaries that move fluidly between the past and the present, and between Vietnam and its diaspora.
Journal Article
“I Heard You Went to Nam”: Home, Hospitality, and Legitimated Violence in Percival Everett’s Walk Me to the Distance
Historian Daniel S. Luck has noted in Selma to Saigon that “the civil rights movement and the debates over the Vietnam War were at the center of the turbulence of the 1960s” (1). While true, one also recognizes that the afterlives of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War are momentous historical events with which America continues to contend. Several African American writers of the post-civil rights/post-Vietnam era, including Percival Everett, have written works of fiction that continue to grapple with the afterlives of these cataclysmic historical events. Set in the American West, Everett’s 1985 novel Walk Me to the Distance finds its protagonist, David Larsen, a returning Vietnam veteran, at loose ends. David winds up stranded in a small, remote town, Slut's Hole, Wyoming, where he eventually decides to stay. His decision to settle in the West is as much influenced by his romanticization of life on the American Frontier as it is with his disgust for a rapidly changing country where he feels he no longer belongs. In this essay, I argue that Walk Me to the Distance is not only an astute meditation on Frontier Mythology and Frontier justice associated with the early settlement of the American West but also that the novel reveals that these foundational myths and ideas continue to be paradigmatic features of American culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Journal Article
A million shades of gray
In 1975 after American troops pull out of Vietnam, a thirteen-year-old boy and his beloved elephant escape into the jungle when the Viet Cong attack his village.
Book
Staying Off the \Tiger's Back\
True to George Ball's metaphor, once the US dismounted the tiger, via the Paris Accords of January 1973, the beast went into a rage. In the wake of the US withdrawal, the fiction known as \"South Vietnam\" rapidly disintegrated, culminating in the communist takeover in Apr 1975. The US left behind vast supplies of equipment, state-of-the-art military bases, hundreds of thousands of terrified former allies and refugees, and an embittered US public. Crucial lessons were readily apparent in the wake of the disastrous war in Vietnam, but instead of learning from history all too many Americans opted for mythology. The Afghan War, at nearly 20 years in duration becoming America's longest war, has now ended conclusively and like the Vietnam War it has done so in defeat, humiliation and finger-pointing.
Journal Article
Fire summer : a novel
You can go home again. When twenty-three-year-old Maia Trieu, a curator's assistant at the Museum of Folklore & Rocks in Little Saigon, Orange County, is offered a research grant to Vietnam for the summer of 1991, she cannot refuse. The grant's sponsor has one stipulation: Maia is to contact her great-aunt to pass on plans to overthrow the current government. The expatriates did not anticipate that Maia would become involved with excursions in search of her mother or attract an entourage: an American traveler, a government agent, an Amerasian singer, and a cat. Maia carries out what she believes is her role as a filial daughter to her late father, a former ARVN soldier, by returning to their homeland to continue the fight for an independent Vietnam. Along the way, however, she meets a cast of characters--historical and fictional, living and dead--who propel her on a journey of self-discovery, through which she begins to understand what it means to love.
Book
History and Precarity
This article argues that Glen Cook’s The Instrumentalities of the Night seeks to drain epic fantasy of its characteristic sense of “totality.” Cook accomplishes this by blending the epic fantasy structure with a picaresque plot. The Black Company books had already attempted to fracture totality through their unique first-person narrative framing device, but this experiment, I argue, only partially succeeds. By applying the picaresque, however, a literature of precarity, Cook achieves a vision of history and historical change as fraught with chance, accident, and randomness—a radical Heraclitean flux. While the series captures totality after a fashion, this totality comes emptied of larger epic meaning. In this regard, Instrumentalities bears some striking resemblances to Lyotard’s famous incredulity toward master narratives, but a low humanism better describes Cook’s approach. In the end, Cook’s experimental picaresque epic fantasy articulates an anthropocentric storyworld without metaphysical legitimations for human action.
Journal Article