Books that shaped our history of the Vietnam War

Type :

Presentation

Pages :

4 pages

Format :

.doc

Published date :

11/19/2008

Category :

Philosophy & literature

Sub category :

Literature

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Summary :

Introductions.
The Vietnam War.
1. Platoon.
2. Born On The Fourth Of July.
3. The Best And The Brightest.
McNamara's In Retrospect.
1. Addition to the nation's understanding of the Vietnam War.
Greene's The Quiet American.
Conclusion.

Abstract

As long as there is war, and as long as the printing press continues to exist, there will be books about war. Yet as media proliferates, the content of these books changes dramatically. With the dearth of eyewitness accounts of earlier wars, save the journals and varying forms of correspondence of the soldiers themselves, the horrifying scope of war remained an unknown for much of the world. that changed with vietnam. Just as television would bring the war to the average citizen, tuning in for the evening news, books were candidly exposing the truths of what war really was. The modern understanding of war, therefore, is a product (if not of direct experience, then) of the media's portrayal of it. books thereby have an increased importance in the transmission of war stories. One might then ask what makes a book important for our understanding of war. The answer to that question is the pith of this essay. The vietnam war, being as recent as it is and as widely covered by the media as it was, lends itself very easily to both historical-fictional accounts, in movies such as Platoon and Born On The Fourth Of July (both based on true stories, though Platoon was indirectly so), as well as in no fictional tales, such as those found in books.