The Father of All Things; A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam

New York: Pantheon Books, 2007. First Edition [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xvm, [1], 407, [7] pages. Illustrations. Bibliography. Index. Tom Bissell (born January 9, 1974) is an American journalist, critic, and fiction writer. He studied English at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. In 1996, when he was 22 years old, Bissell went to Uzbekistan as a volunteer for the Peace Corps. He was there for seven months before returning home. He worked as a book editor in New York City and edited, among other books, The Collected Stories of Richard Yates and Paula Fox's memoir Borrowed Finery. He is a frequent reviewer for The New York Times Book Review. Bissell's father served in the Marines during the Vietnam War, alongside author and journalist Philip Caputo. The two remained friends during Bissell's childhood and Caputo read Bissell's work and encouraged him in his early writing efforts. His books have earned him several prizes, including the Rome Prize and the Anna Akhmatova Prize. Derived from a Kirkus review: A penetrating look back at the Vietnam conflict, with Bissell alternately guiding and following his veteran father. It took Bissell a little doing to convince his father to travel with him to Vietnam in 2003. A Marine junior officer who served in-country in 1966, before things turned definitively bad, the elder Bissell rides with a few ghosts. His son worries that, like so many veterans, he is haunted by failure. Father and son travel to Hue, My Lai, Chu Lai, Saigon and other key locations of the war, making discoveries about the past and about each other. Bissell delivers a riveting, you-are-there account of the fall of Saigon-not just the dust-kicking helicopters and hands poking through embassy gates, but the behind-the-scenes activities of the likes of Donald Rumsfeld and Henry Kissinger. Big-picture politics take second place to the achingly personal in Bissell's heartfelt book.