This is a good read. It's an academic essay on a difficult subject. I highlighted more in this book than I have in any other book. Very thought provoking. I was not surprised by atrocities and cruelties committed by Americans. I was surprised by the interpretations of war and it's aftermath by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Kudos to Nguyen for an excellent piece of work.I agree with 99% of all in the book except sometimes I disagree with the degree to which his assertions or descriptions are true. For examp...

A brilliant book about war and its never-ending consequences. Viet Thanh Nguyen dissects how society glamorizes veterans while dehumanizing victims, how certain industries profit from war and its bloodshed, and how we often only interpret wars from our own side (hence, why Americans call it the Vietnam War whereas the Vietnamese call it the American War). Nguyen gathers evidence from museums, monuments, novels, films, etc. to illustrate the devastating effects of war and how we often overlook th...

I think the main points in this long academic treatment of topics surrounding war and memory are summed up in this Fresh Air interview.The author spent eleven years on the research for this book, and along the way also wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Sympathizer. I gave the novel five stars but despite the longlisting of this book for the National Book Award for Non-Fiction, I won't be able to rate this one as highly. It is clear that Nguyen is interested in war and memory. I was led

I finished Viet Nguyen's latest a few weeks back, but I haven't posted anything yet because I've been mulling over its message. He doesn't pull punches in his critique of American adventuring overseas, nor does he fall back on a too-convenient portrayal of Vietnamese as victims. If nothing else, Nguyen's book is a clarion call for a full and honest assessment of inhumanity, in all its forms. This does not, however, mean that both sides are equal in this particular conflict. As Nguyen is quick to...

At a time when the discussion of the relationship between politics and art is at an absolute nadir in America (on one side, people who tell you white authors aren't allowed to write minority characters, on the other side, people who tell you that modernist art is tantamount to the decline of Westahn Civilahzation, neither of whom would know class struggle if it began violating their flabby asses), Viet Thanh Nguyen speaks great truths about history, race relations, literature, memory, tokenism,

...hey no offense but why is Just Memory the best piece of nonfiction writing to have ever been written.In Just Memory, the question surrounds the politics of memory. In the media, the identity of war dictates its representation in different media: Vietnam, the bad war, is a tragedy for America, but only for America. Likewise in Vietnam, the Term ‘American War’ invites Vietnamese to think of themselves “as victims of foreign aggression,” rather than an oftentime perpetrator and invador of Cambod...

National Book Award Longlist for Nonfiction 2016. Vietnamese-American author Nguyen makes a convincing case that the memory of war belongs to the victors; or if no victor exists, to the nation that best defines the conflict through print, photographs, and big-screen films. Americans lost roughly 58,000 lives during the Viet Nam War. However, Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia lost nearly 4 million. The United States has the Viet Nam Memorial, numerous books, and films like Apocalypse Now that pay trib...

I first watched Full Metal Jacket when I was in high school. I must have been 15 or 16 years old. Most of my friends had already seen it, and they would quote lines from the opening scene all the time. Sergeant Hartman, the senior drill instructor, eviscerates a group of Marine recruits on their first day at boot camp. He curses them in extraordinary turns of phrase, insults their racial backgrounds and physical appearances. The way my high school buddies related this scene led me to believe the...

So many important lessons in this book, about how to consider our perceived enemies, how to re-consider ourselves and our capacity for good and bad, how our identities can be actively shaped, how to really forgive and how to make peace present instead of just make war absent.

This was a sluggish read for me. The language kept settling into bland assertions about the war and its aftermath, assertions that I found to be both self-evident, and overly verbose. The tone altered from intimate writing to academic writing, with little warning. Also I think you get away with writing sentences that begin with words like: "The Vietnamese in America understood that..." only if you're writing a sociological study, and only if you have actually interviewed enough individuals in th...

This book has the characteristic of a long, multi-chaptered, essay about the interrelationship of war, memory, and identity. The book's narrative penetrates into memories of the Vietnamese War with particular focus on the differences between winners and losers—the powerful and weak. The book's consideration of memory includes the subjects of trauma, literature, news media, movies, memorials, and museums. In particular I found the book's discussion of novels about Vietnam to be enlightening becau...

A thoughtful, erudite examination of the Vietnam War specifically and international relations in general. Nguyen presents a lot of thought provoking ideas and supports his arguments with well-reasoned logic and thorough research. Nguyen is both a first-rate academic mind and an excellent writer of prose, and both skills are fully on display here. I listened to it on audiobook, which was definitely a mistake for me. I expected this to be a softer, simpler book about the U.S. and Vietnam 50 years

Once or twice a year I read a book that dislodges my point of view and drops it someplace I hadn't known existed. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (2016) by Viet Thanh Nguyen is one of those books, bursting with ideas and brilliantly illuminating from stunning angles. Nguyen tells us that "All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory." He calls for an ethical, simultaneous awareness of our humanity and inhumanity, for equal access to the...

This book turned out to be a lot different than I was expecting. I had read Nguyen's short story collection _The Refugees_ about a year ago and liked his writing. I was expecting this book, based on the title, to be a set of personal reflections. It is that to some extent, but it is written in a far more "traditionally academic" style than I had anticipated. Over the course of the book, Nguyen develops related concepts of "just remembering" and "just forgetting," considering how we as individual...