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The book is in two parts - the first part being about the tour of duty in Vietnam for an infantryman and the second nominally being about "The World". I thought the first part did a fine job of describing the physical and mental hardships imposed on the grunts by the climate, the terrain and the unpredictable boredom/terror nature of the conflict. Following that, Part Two takes the reader through what I believe is the material that really distinguishes this book as one that anyone who studies the Vietnam war should read. Anderson presents a thoughtful and straightforward discussion about the attitudes of Americans who served and those who did not and the forces that shaped those attitudes. He does a great job of relating these to the struggles the servicemen faced in reentering civilian life and to the struggles they faced in dealing with Vietnamese society and their own combat leaders. Placing the veterans' homecoming adjustments, atrocities and fraggings in this context was what moved this book from the very good to the extraordinary class.
Easy to read, hard to put down. Read it - you'll enjoy it and you'll learn some interesting things.
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Sit back, fasten your seatbelt and go back to Mississippi after the Civil War. It's a tough place to visit, you sure would not want to live there. Eianr E. Kvaran
Hair does a remarkable job of pulling together the obscure and little-known facts about "Robert Charles", an obscure and little-known historical figure who would have quickly made himself perfectly at home in 1960s America. More importantly, Hair's research and narrative provide a brilliant portrait of a period of American history, approaching the mystery of Robert Charles through a necessarily oblique but dead-on examination of turn of the century racial etiquette in the South; Afro-American attitudes regarding racism, self-defense, identity, militancy, and politics; state and regional economic issues; and the pathological behavior of the white victims of supremacist theories and beliefs. Although the question of who, exactly, was Robert Charles cannot be completely answered---if it could, Hair would have done it---the question of WHY did Robert Charles exist and die as he did is effectively answered through a compelling narrative that proves that history and its writing can be as exciting as any modern story of injustice, oppression, personal dignity in the face of ultimate destruction, and right beaten to ground by actual numerical, and assumed racial, superiority. Hair deserves to be honored for his detective work and meticulous research as well as his ability to make about two hundred pages do the work of some who would have said the same thing, and less eloquently, in six hundred. He should also be commended for refusing to let anything but historical facts and sound reasoning fill in the blank spaces in his history because the temptation to make assumptions in order to flesh out Charles' story must have been a consideration during the writing of the book. This is a small, well-written, rewarding examination of a historical figure and the times that he lived and died in. It's surprising to me that no one has made a movie based upon the book since it has all the drama, suspense, tension, tragedy, and action anyone could possibly hope for regarding a historical figure whose pledge to live and die like a man was a sacred vow and, perhaps, a moral lesson. For those who are aware of Robert F. Williams' place in Afro-American history, Robert Charles will be recognized both as of his time and ahead of it, helping to lay a foundation for the future struggles of others.
Considering the fact that Hair first published this book in the late 1970s or very early 1980s, I am amazed that there are so few reviewers of it. I fervently hope that the lack of reviews is not an indication of a lack of readers for this important historical work.
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---Megan W.
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I thought that I understood these issues well, having been a researcher in the area myself until 1987, but I have to report that they filled embarrassingly large gaps in my knowledge, particularly in relation to experiments, including in subjects that I used to teach to undergraduates.
I would recommend this book to anyone, but most of all to those who call themselves practitioners in the subject, to remind them of how, if at all, what they do fits in to the bigger picture, and also to remind them, to quote Murray Gell Mann (who was probably quoting someone else at the time), that "the best instrument that a theoretician has is his waste paper basket". As the mathematical tangents that theoreticians have gone off on in the last twenty years get ever more bizarre and disconnected from reality, I fully expect this to be full to overflowing soon.
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How good is the present compendium for today's purposes? Certainly very good for what it does within its limits, but those limits are significant. By now there have, for example, been a good many books proving the existence of bawdy puns and various related kinds of slang within Shakespeare, and for proper understanding of that author a glossary should certainly explain such Elizabethan usages. In common with *The Oxford English Dictionary* (for which Onions did a great deal of important work), *A Shakespeare Glossary* is - and remains even in its present form - largely silent and uninformative on these matters, with the result that modern readers who look up a word suspecting that it may have a bawdy sense now no longer current will find themselves almost always frustrated (in strictly scholarly terms!).
Such readers will have to turn to e.g. Eric Partridge's *Shakespeare's Bawdy*, which remains invaluable, but is itself coming to look less than complete now that we know so much more, perhaps especially since the publication of Gordon Williams's *A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature* (expensive and not easy to use, but a real mine of information).
Despite these reservations I would still recommend the Onions-Eagleson glossary as a worthwhile component on "the Shakespeare shelf". It should be added - but this is not a fault of the volume - that in many cases a modern reader is simply not AWARE that a word in Shakespeare does not mean what it means today, and therefore will not look it up in any glossary or dictionary. This makes detailed well-annotated volumes such as are published with the New Cambridge, Oxford, and Arden series (or the one-volume Bevington Shakespeare) essential for anyone wishing to understand what he or she is reading: in such editions, the necessary glosses are volunteered by editors who ARE aware of the fact that many words have changed in meaning since Shakespeare's time . - Joost Daalder, Professor of English, Flinders University, South Australia
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I have translated 37 of these collection into Farsi.The Farsi title is Dastan e Nagahan meaning Sudden Fiction.
Thanks to the talented authors of this anthology and its fine predecessors,Sudden Fiction and other titles like Flash Fiction and Sudden Fiction Continued.
I recommend the readers to buy this book and enjoy its taste in discovering a world wide scenery,multi cultural surprises and find new friends.
The stories are indeed perfect for bed time reading
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