Name: This Is a True War Story. My Improbable History with Vietnam
Price: 59.43 NZD
Availability: InStock
Author: Robert K. Brigham
ISBN: 9780226846880

portada This Is a True War Story. My Improbable History with Vietnam

This Is a True War Story. My Improbable History with Vietnam

Type

Physical Book

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Author

Robert K. Brigham

Year

2026

Pages

264

Format

Hardcover

Dimensions

22.90 x 15.20 cm

ISBN13

9780226846880

This Is a True War Story. My Improbable History with Vietnam

Robert K. Brigham (Author) · University of Chicago Press · Hardcover

Cheaper New Book Imported to New Zealand

Delivery: 12 Aug - 20 Aug

NZ$ 59.43

Faster New Book Imported to New Zealand

Delivery: 29 Jul - 05 Aug

NZ$ 71.50

Import costs and 15% GST included in the price ✅

NZ$ 59.43

Add to Wishlist

Synopsis "This Is a True War Story. My Improbable History with Vietnam"

A personal account by a war historian and adoptee who discovers his biological father was a famous Marine combat photographer in Vietnam. Robert K. Brigham has had a substantial career as a historian of the Vietnam War, with a hand in nine books, a documentary, public history projects, and more. While many a historian has felt compelled at some point to write about a subject close to them personally, Brigham did not think he was doing that. But, at age 58, Brigham, who had long known he was adopted, discovered that he’d improbably and unknowingly been studying and talking about his real father for decades. That man, Bruce Atwell, was a Marine Corps photographer who took some of that war’s most indelible and widely reproduced pictures. Brigham had used those images over and over again in decades’ worth of classes and public lectures, never knowing the truth. Both Brigham and Atwell were products of the American foster care and adoption system, and both were defined professionally by Vietnam. In a story shot through with echoes and shadows, Brigham not only reveals his own history as an adoptee but opens a startlingly fresh vantage on the fragility of American families; the power of social norms and taboos to shape lives; and the forces that inequitably disrupt families, not least of them war. The result is an accessible and moving book that is at once both a powerful personal story and an illuminating social critique.