Dispatches

I could say this is one of the best memoirs I've read. I could also say it is one of the most brilliant books on war I've ever read. It would probably be easier, however, for me to just acknowledge I haven't read many books that have the power, the poetry, the intensity, the vividness, the bathos and the pathos that Herr pushes through every single page of this amazing book. This is a book that haunts you hard while you read it and resonates both the horror of war and the surreal qualities of war and the men who fight it.

I've read dozens of books dealing with war and Dispatches stands apart from nearly all of them.
This is not meant to be an authoritative historical overview of the conflict in Vietnam. Rather it's a deeply personal account of Herr's time spent with the guys in the mud, doing the fighting, marking their time and hoping to make it home in one piece.
Plenty of books have been written from this perspective before. But Herr's jazz-like prose, keen observations and raw honesty paint a picture that's so immersive it will be hard to forget.
Put it in your shopping cart now.

I have listen over the last couples of months with fascination. The reading is well paced not monotone. The scientific explanations are will written and easy to understand.
I have really enjoyed this audio book and would recommend it just for the historical perspective alone. It provides a startling and sometimes grotesque picture in words on subject almost forgotten by today generations.
Makes you think before saying “just nuke them”.

This was a fantastic audible! It brought me closer to the Vietnam Vets and what they experienced as they fought in it and those that laid down their lives in Vietnam. The author, Michael Herr, wrote in such a way that you felt close to his emotions and the emotions of the soldiers. With his descriptions you could visualize the images that he saw as a journalist in Vietnam.

He did an awesome job of telling his story and theirs. You could easily put yourself in his place. You could also understand how it had such ravaging effects of the soldiers.

The performance by Ray Porter was superb.

I was definitely glad that I purchased and listened to this audible.

Here's a superb look at the folly of how the US conducts war. Cover your eyes and just listen. Is this Iraq? Afghanistan? Vietnam?!!!

Some things never change.

Brilliant book.

A superbly written, personal account of the Vietnam War told with absolutely pitch-perfect narration. Porter's performance empowers and invigorates Herr's writing in the same way a great actor breathes life into Shakespeare. Dispatches is not a linear history of the war or a chronology of Herr's experience. It is a series of vignettes, impressions and reactions to something Herr knows he will never comprehend. He writes masterfully of war's effects and how it feels.

Gives you a feeling of what it was like, greatest Vietnam War Book ever written

Herr paints a brutal picture of the Vietnam experience. If this is a part of history you are fascinated by or interested in, you must listen to this work.

I haven't read the print version but the audio version tells the book in a way that kept me coming back for more. I couldn't wait to hear the narrator tell more of what was to come. He brought life to the writing that can't be duplicated in print. If you enjoyed

Unbroken - Laura Hillenbrand - The narrator alone takes the book to a new level.

I don't think I've heard him before.

The very last sentence of the book shouts at you and makes you realize what the men went through over there. This will truly stick with you and make you look at Vietnam differently than before.