Women war correspondents -- Fiction. |
Americans -- Vietnam -- Fiction. |
Vietnam War, 1961-1975 -- Fiction. |
War -- Psychological aspects -- Fiction. |
Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam) -- Fiction. |
Vietnam -- Fiction. |
Yankees |
Vietnam Conflict, 1961-1975 |
Vietnamese Conflict, 1961-1975 |
Vietnamese War, 1961-1975 |
HCM (Vietnam) |
HCMC (Vietnam) |
Ho-Tschi-Minh-Stadt (Vietnam) |
Hočiminovo Město (Vietnam) |
Hu Chih-ming shih (Vietnam) |
Hu Zhiming Shi (Vietnam) |
Sài Gòn (Vietnam : 1976- ) |
Saigon (Vietnam : 1976- ) |
Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh (Vietnam) |
TP. Hồ Chí Minh (Vietnam) |
Betʻŭnam |
Biet Nam |
Bietnam |
Biyetnan |
Chính phủ nước Cộng hòa xã hội chủ nghĩa Việt Nam |
Cộng hòa xã hội chủ nghĩa Việt Nam |
Fītnām |
Fīyatnām |
Fiyitnām |
I͡Uzhnyĭ Vʹetnam |
National Republic of Vietnam |
Nước Cộng hòa xã hội chủ nghĩa Việt Nam |
Petʻŭnam |
Republica Socialista de Vietnam |
Rèpublica socialista du Viêt Nam |
République socialiste du Vietnam |
RSV |
RSVN |
S.R.V. |
Satsyi͡alistychnai͡a Rėspublika V'etnam |
Socialist Republic of Viet Nam |
Socialist Republic of Vietnam |
Sosialistiese Republiek Viëtnam |
Sot͡sialisticheska republika Vietnam |
Sot͡sialisticheskai͡a Respublika Vʹetnam |
SRV |
SRVN |
Vʹet-Nam |
Vʹetnam |
Viet-Nam |
Vijetnam |
Vītnām |
Vīyitnām |
Vjetnamio |
Vyetnam |
Vyetnam Sosialist Respublikası |
Wietnam |
Yüeh-nan |
Сацыялістычная Рэспубліка В'етнам |
Социалистическа република Виетнам |
Виетнам |
В'етнам |
فيتنام |
Available:
Library | Shelf Number | Shelf Location | Status |
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Searching... Acushnet Library | SOLI | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
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Searching... Foxboro - Boyden Library | FIC SOLI, T. | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Seekonk Public Library | FIC SOLI | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Wareham Free Library | F SOL | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Westport Free Public Library | SOLI | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
Método práctico de la guerrilla Marcelo Ferroni La aventura desconocida del Che Guevara Deprimido por el reciente fracaso guerrillero en el Congo, el Che reúne a sus más fieles subalternos para iniciar una nueva revolución. Esta vez su objetivo es Bolivia. Cansado de la burocracia cubana, quiere hacer las cosas a su manera: sin acuerdos ni concesiones, con el método implacable que él mismo creó. A partir de documentación inédita sobre João Batista, el único brasileño que participó en el proyecto de Guevara, biografías, diarios y declaraciones, Ferroni reconstruye la aventura desconocida del Che.
Summary
A New York Times Best Seller! A New York Times Notable Book!
A unique and sweeping debut novel of an American female combat photographer in the Vietnam War, as she captures the wrenching chaos and finds herself torn between the love of two men.
On a stifling day in 1975, the North Vietnamese army is poised to roll into Saigon. As the fall of the city begins, two lovers make their way through the streets to escape to a new life. Helen Adams, an American photojournalist, must take leave of a war she is addicted to and a devastated country she has come to love. Linh, the Vietnamese man who loves her, must grapple with his own conflicted loyalties of heart and homeland. As they race to leave, they play out a drama of devotionand betrayal that spins them back through twelve war-torn years, beginning in the splendor of Angkor Wat, with their mentor, larger-than-life war correspondent Sam Darrow, once Helen's infuriating love and fiercest competitor, and Linh's secret keeper, boss and truest friend.
Tatjana Soli paints a searing portrait of an American woman's struggle and triumph in Vietnam, a stirring canvas contrasting the wrenching horror of war and the treacherous narcotic of obsession with the redemptive power of love. Readers will be transfixed by this stunning novel of passion, duty and ambition among the ruins of war.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This suspenseful, eloquent, sprawling novel illustrates the violence of the Vietnam War as witnessed by three interconnected photographers. Helen Adams, the first woman combat photographer sent to cover the Vietnam war, navigates the boys' club of war photographers, pushing her way onto military missions. Soon after her arrival in Saigon, she falls under the spell of seasoned, jaded, and married Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, Sam Darrow, while also feeling a confusing pull toward his assistant, Linh, a Vietnamese ex-soldier and knowledgeable photographer and guide. Linh, who has lost his wife and entire family to the war, roams the country with Darrow and then Helen (whom Darrow asks Linh to protect). Soli looks at the complex motivations and ambitions of the waves of American photographers who descended on Vietnam seeking glory and fame through their gut-wrenching photos of mass graves, crippled children, and dying soldiers, while also reveling in sex, drugs, and good times as the war raged around them. This harrowing depiction of life and death shows that even as the country burned, love and hope triumphed. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Soli's debut revolves around three characters whose lives are affected by the Vietnam War. Helen Adams comes to Vietnam in the hopes of documenting the combat that took her brother from her. She immediately attracts the attention of the male journalists in the region, and quickly falls into an affair with the grizzled but darkly charismatic war photographer Sam Darrow. As Helen starts to make her own way as a photographer in Vietnam, drawing as much attention for her gender as for her work, Darrow sends her his Vietnamese assistant, Linh, a reluctant soldier who deserted the SVA in the wake of his wife's death. While Linh wants nothing more than to escape the war, Darrow and Helen are consumed by it, unable to leave until the inevitable tragedy strikes. The strength here is in Soli's vivid, beautiful depiction of war-torn Vietnam, from the dangers of the field, where death can be a single step away, to the emptiness of the Saigon streets in the final days of the American evacuation.--Huntley, Kristine Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
It is April 1975. The North Vietnamese are marching into Saigon, the Americans are fleeing in helicopters. And in Tatjana Soli's splendid first novel, "The Lotus Eaters," a group of Western journalists sip "liberated" Champagne on the roof of the Caravelle Hotel as they reflect on all that has been lost. For Helen, a veteran photographer who made her name covering the war, the resounding absence of planes and artillery has transformed Saigon into an eerie place of "nostalgia and history and failure." Failed dreams and failed ambitions may be the very stuff from which Vietnam narratives are fashioned; but although Helen's war is over, there is no guarantee she will be on a plane home. As one of her colleagues says ominously. "The war doesn't ever have to end for us." For the interpreters of violence there will always be another war zone with new treasures of heartbreaking stories. At the novel's opening, Helen is a 32-year-old woman "in a young mans profession" whose "ambition in the larger world had faded until there was only her and the camera and the war." She was drawn to Vietnam after her brother was killed in combat; afraid she would miss her chance to see action herself, she dropped out of college and began training as a photographer, a remarkable act of courage for a "poor little scared girl from California." Helen, in fact, is remarkable in almost every way: she learns to speak Vietnamese, shuns the company of her desk-job associates and, after a tumultuous affair with her mentor, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer named Darrow, she falls in love and marries her Vietnamese assistant, Linh. While complicated love affairs are difficult to evoke in any piece of fiction, passion amid ambushes and firefights could be particularly treacherous to nail down. Helen's feelings for Darrow - who is unhappily married and emotionally unavailable - defy sense and are, thus, perfectly understandable in the upside-down logic of a war zone. While Linh is a better match, his personal tragedies have left him damaged and hesitant to fall in love. Soli portrays these love stories so thoughtfully, and with such care, that they take precedence over the fireworks of battle. In this novel, love eclipses war, at least momentarily. With Linh's help, Helen finds that Vietnam, a place she once considered "backward," has become home. She has "slipped beneath the surface of the war and found the country" only to grow uneasy with her identity as a war photographer who has gone native. She finds it "such a cliché to expose the war, or even wanting to test one's self against it," yet she risks her life to capture images of the violence around her, sure that "the sacrifice had been worth it." Helen's restlessness and grappling, her realization that "a woman sees war differently," provide a new and fascinating perspective on Vietnam. Vivid battle scenes, sensual romantic entanglements and elegant writing add to the pleasures of "The Lotus Eaters." Soli's hallucinatory vision of wartime Vietnam seems at once familiar and new. The details - the scorched villages, the rancid smells of Saigon - arise naturally, underpinning the novel's sharp realism and characterization. In an author's note, Soli writes that she's been an "eager reader of every book" about Vietnam she has come across, but she is never overt or heavy-handed. Nothing in this novel seems "researched." Rather, its disparate sources have been smoothed and folded into Soli's own distinct voice. Still, readers familiar with writing about Vietnam might recognize models for Soli's characters among the flesh-and-blood photojournalists of the war - Sean Flynn, Henri Huet, Catherine Leroy and Dickey Chapelle, the first American female war correspondent to die in action. Chapelle, with her signature Australian bush hat, fatigues and pearl earrings, covered the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa for National Geographic, was captured and jailed for more than a month during the Hungarian uprising and arrived in Vietnam in the early '60s. In her 1962 book "What's a Woman Doing Here?" Chapelle writes of her work as a correspondent: "They were stories, yes. Telling them fed me, yes. But their substance was not innocent. I had become an interpreter of violence." Like Chapelle, Helen is acutely ambivalent about her moral position as a war journalist. She is intent on pondering whether those who represent war - through reporting or photography - are doing anything but replicating the violence they depict. Does war journalism change public opinion, or does it merely lead, as one photojournalist in "The Lotus Eaters" asks, to "a steady loss of impact until violence becomes meaningless"? Do gruesome images of war foster revulsion and opposition to violence on the part of the public, or do the images simply translate into war porn? SOLI doesn't offer simple answers to these questions, but leaves her characters in a state of discomfort about their work. After getting an "incredible shot of a dead soldier/woman/child; a real tearjerker," the journalists would turn away from one another with "a kind of postcoital shame." Helen finds that "in the face of real tragedy, they were unreal, vultures; they were all about getting product. In their worst moments, each of them feared being a kind of macabre Hollywood, and it was only in terms of the future that they regained their dignity, became dubious heroes." Yet Helen believes in the redemptive power of her work. Indeed, she believes that "every good war picture is an antiwar picture." When accused of being a mere tourist of the war, she is chagrined by the realization that her early months in-country were a charade, a time when she had played at war, when "the whole country had merely served as backdrop for her adventure." But what, exactly, is the nature of Helen's adventure in Vietnam? The novel's title refers to a passage in Homer's "Odyssey" about a country of lotus eaters, a "race that eat the flowery lotus fruit" and share it - and its opiate comforts - with those who wash ashore, so they won't want to leave. The metaphor is apt. In Soli's novel, there are those who eat the fruit of the lotus and those who do not, journalists who experience the country alongside soldiers and those who choose desk jobs back in Saigon. Soli defines the unquantifiable desire that can seduce a person to danger, even to a kind of suicide wish. "That's one of the keys to life here," says Helen's lover Darrow, a man whose addiction to danger she will come to mimic. "Sudden and sublime. Sudden and awful. Everything distilled to its most intense. That's why we're all hooked." Helen may try to escape, but in the end she has become one of the lotus eaters herself. "My whole experience was clouded over there," she says in an attempt to make sense of her addiction to Vietnam. "We were in a dream. It was so vivid, I thought it wasn't real. But it was. Truer than anything here." Soli's photojournalist heroine has 'slipped beneath the surface of the war and found the country.' For more on the literature of the war, this time in Vietnam itself, see "Letter From Vietnam," by Matt Steinglass, Page 27. Danielle Trussoni is the author of "Falling Through the Earth: A Memoir." Her first novel, "Angelology," has just been published.
Kirkus Review
An impressive debut novel about a female photographer covering the Vietnam War. Helen Adams is an experienced photojournalist with ten years in Vietnam on her rsum. The cinematic opening chapter shows her at the center of the chaotic, violent, desperate streets of Saigon in 1975, on the cusp of the communist takeover, as Vietnamese and Americans race to escape. The narrative then flashes back to a decade earlier, when Helen arrives in bustling Saigon as a young, nave photographer so anxious not to "miss out" on the war that she has dropped out of college to travel there. Making up in grit what she lacks in experience, she secures photography work, scrappily clawing her way up from tamer lifestyle pieces to covering field missions and combat. She is taken in by a fellow ex-pat named Darrow, a photographer whose obsession with the war and the power his camera gives him to capture it dominates his every move. They enter into a tumultuous, passionate love affair as the war worsens. Though she fears becoming as reckless and singly motivated as Darrow, Helen transitions into a seasoned war photographer, battling her emotions about the inhumanity of war with her professional purpose. She also takes on a unique challenge as one of the few working female ex-pats in Vietnam. In tandem with the two Americans but undeniably distinct from them, Linh, Darrrow's enigmatic Vietnamese assistant, steadfastly walks the difficult line between patriot and traitor, and the three form a friendship out of their harrowing situation. When tragedy strikes, Linh and Helen are thrown together and eventually find their friendship developing into love. This is a visceral story about the powerful and complex bonds that war creates. It raises profound questions about professional and personal lives that are based on, and often dependent on, a nation's horrific strife. Graphic but never gratuitous, the gripping, haunting narrative explores the complexity of violence, foreignness, even betrayal. Moving and memorable. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Seen through the lens of young American freelance photographer Helen Adams, this evocative debut novel is a well researched exploration of Vietnam between 1963 and 1975, when the United States pulled out of the conflict. Helen, who has come to Vietnam partly to discover what really happened to her brother, is determined to see the real Vietnam, combat and all. The narrative focuses on Adams, Pulitzer Prize-winning combat photojournalist Sam Darrow, and his Vietnamese assistant, Linh, revealing their relationships, loyalties, and ambitions and the terrible toll the war takes on them all. As readers, we come to understand the characters' attraction to and ambivalence about the war, how love can survive and thrive under such extreme conditions (Helen and Linh have an affair), the courage needed to report under war conditions and the journalistic principles involved, and the fragile beauty of this war-torn country and its people. Verdict Like Marianne Wiggins's Eveless Eden and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried before it, Soli's poignant work will grab the attention of most readers. A powerful new writer to watch. [See Prepub Alert, LJ-Gwen Vredevoogd, Marymount Univ., Arlington, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.