Vietnam War Archives - The Gilmore Guide to Books

The Women by Kristin Hannah

Catherine — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 07:15:23 +0000

Silence. Shaking my head. Those are the two reactions I had when I finished reading Kristin Hannah’s new novel, The Women. I’m not sure the last time I read a book that brought me to tears so frequently and was also such a vivid reminder of a particular time in my adolescence, even if the […]

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Dust Child

Catherine — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 07:59:03 +0000

The Vietnam War has been written about from many points of view in fiction, but for the most part my reading has focused on the years of the war, rife as they are with the atrocities perpetuated on the Vietnamese, both by their own people (ARVN soldiers in the South, Viet Cong in the North) […]

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October Reading Wrap-Up

Catherine — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 04:15:16 +0000

My October reading was as mercurial as the month itself. Here in Michigan we had high humidity, heat, and mosquitos right up until last week, meaning I was cranky and battling hair frizz that made me look like the bride of Frankenstein. Now, I’m bundled up in fleece and socks. In the same way […]

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The Mountains Sing

Catherine — Mon, 16 Mar 2020 04:16:27 +0000

If our stories survive, we will not die, even when our bodies are no longer here on this earth. Hương and her grandmother live alone in Hanoi until they are told to evacuate and move to a remote mountain village for their safety. It’s the 1970s and the midst of the Vietnam War. Hương’s parents […]

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The Given World

Catherine — Mon, 27 Apr 2015 07:12:08 +0000

When Riley is thirteen her brother Mick is declared missing in Vietnam. This news kills what little desire she has to stay in their small town and by the time she is eighteen she is gone, making her way from Montana to San Francisco to see the ocean and to escape every facet of life […]

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The Sympathizer: A Novel

Catherine — Mon, 20 Apr 2015 07:10:57 +0000

So it was that we soaped ourselves in sadness and we rinsed ourselves with hope, and for all that we believed almost every rumor we heard, almost all of us refused to believe that our nation was dead. It is only fitting that the narrator in The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s debut novel, is never […]

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The Headmaster’s Wager

Catherine — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 07:30:56 +0000

In 1930 Percival Chen’s father left him and his mother in mainland China to go to Vietnam and seek his fortune. He never returned and so, after his mother’s death, Percival left their province to go to school in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, the Japanese invasion in 1941 meant that Hong Kong was no longer […]

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