This is a book about the Fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War. It is written in first person and is one man's view of what is going on. It is totally monologue, as far as I could see written by someone imagining what it was like as he is far too young to really know. So, it is historical fiction of a sort which I usually like.

I got it to read because it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. I cannot believe it won over The Nightingale.

The book (after 25 pages) did not hold my interest at all. I had a brother who went to Vietnam and many (more than 25,000) did not come home, dying in vain in pointless political war. I have a lot of anger about the war and resentment towards those who felt the U.S. didn't do enough like some of the characters in the book.

We lost too many to read this casually. Sorry, I couldn't continue. I was disappointed as I found a lot of great reading in recent Pulitzer winners. I guess this was the book to read in the NY Times opinion or something. It totally left me wanting to read something about an earlier time like the 1920s and 30s.

I still have too much sorrow and anger over Vietnam and what it did to a generation of boys who were lost to the political nonsense of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Thank God for Gerald Ford getting us out or we'd still be there.

And history does repeat itself, look at Iraq. What the heck did that accomplish?

And this book is all telling and no showing. It is a monologue, far as I can tell. I couldn't read beyond page 20 because it just didn't do it for me. It didn't capture my interest or hook me in. Mostly, it just annoyed me.

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Created Apr 05, 2018 at 9:55am • Submit your own review...