In this story, Ehrhart beautifully tells of the I Corp Marine's experience in '67-68. The cost, both physically and spiritually,to the soldier has to my mind never seemed so true. Can the innocence and ignorance, if indeed they are different things, last in the face of the reality of war's warped and mishapen environment? What happens to the soldier when faced with his own ignorance and the evils of war, for which he is in many ways responsible? The tension between the two different Ehrharts in the book lies in the attempt to justify his actions in Viet Nam to himself, and if nothing else, to find some comfort even from outside himself. He is both proud and disgusted (I wish I had a stronger word here) by his "accomplishments" in Viet Nam. Where do we find ourselves when the conflict is over? The answer is perhaps nowhere, perhaps in the shower. (You must read the book to understand my last statement):)

Was required reading in a class I took about the Vietnam War. Reading this memoir rapidly went from a school assignment chore to pleasure. I read the next two books in the series the following summer. Ehrhart exposes his inner self on the page to the point where it can actually be somewhat difficult to read. He gave a lecture to our class at the end of the semester, and it was quite moving. Do check it out.

The Vietnam war, what was it like for a combat marine? Read this book and its sequel to find out. Mr. Ehrhart is a gifted storyteller. His story is unique. It's amazing how little it is referred to in bibliographies.

This book is really great, it's about a very important but little understood issue. It's full of factual documentation of all aspects of the MIA issue -- from how the counting was done, to the various political angles the issue took at various times throughout the war -- and is a great read, as well. It brought back a lot of memories of the bizarre things that went on then, and still do today.

Franklin has done a great service for contemporaty America, and the collective memory of the Vietnam War in U.S. history. His book illustrates that maxim that truth is not only the first casualty of war, but often suffers long after a war has concluded.

His extensive research reveals that the post-Vietnam War POW/MIA "myth" (i.e. a misrepresentation of the truth) has been a cruel hoax propagated by right-wing politicians (Nixon, Kissinger, Robert Dornan, Ronald Reagan, Ross Perot, and a host of others) in an attempt to create a pseudo-history of the Vietnam War where the U.S. military become the "real" victims of this war, not the millions of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians whose country was destroyed.

As Franklin notes, "every responsible investigation conducted since the end of the war has reached the same conclusion: there is no credible evidence that live Americans [were] held against their will in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, or China" after the war." (p. 14) Franklin knowledgeably concludes his book by noting that "the last chapter of the Vietnam War cannot be written so long as millions of Americans remain possessed by the POW/MIA myth."

The lesson is clear. Beware of false politicians who manufacture bogus history while cruelly exploiting other peoples' tragedies to further their own warped and self-serving political agenda. H. Bruce Franklin's book more than lives up to John Lennon's Vietanm-era plea - "gimme some truth, just gimme some truth." You'll find it in this book.

Passing Time's time pasting took only one night! In that time W. D. Ehrhart flashed me back to '70, 68, 69, 71, and the nitexmasarclights of '72, Ho ho ho chi minhnity returns with both laughter and extreme anger! Ah! The ying and yang of it to me who calls Bill and old old dear friend whom I had never availed myself to his insight and wit like I did last night with Passing Time! Five stars *****, but never too soon to be a new motion picture. Of an old e-6 hippy from Perkasie, Pa, who graduated from Swarthmore College and worked at sea like all "Old Salt" gyrenes who went a few places, saw a few things and still live to tell about it in all speldid details from the heart. Perspicatious (if that can be now a new adjective!) jvb

This work by H. Bruce Franklin would be a good beginning
place for anyone interested in Melville's knowledge of
and use of mythology. That said, it should also be said
that it should be used with caution. Franklin is determined
to focus each of the major works within the framework
of a particular mythic structure...which he believes
he discerns by the various multiple allusions and images
to be found in the work. Perhaps he has the correct
grasp, perhaps he doesn't. But the questing thinker should
at least know where Franklin is going, and the maps he
plans to use to guide the traveler along the way.
The title of this review suggests a good alternative
text which one could have beside one, to counter-balance
Franklin's more "civilized" approach to mythology -- and
that is a work which alerts us to the fact that in
dealing with mythology (even the glorious mythology of
the Greeks) we should not forget its ancient, more
primitive roots and how they survive in the later
myths--that work is Jane Ellen Harrison's _Prolegomena
to the Study of Greek Religion_ -1903-, modern
reprinting by Princeton Univ. Press, 1991, Mythos Books.
Franklin, in his "Acknowledgments" (this book was
first published in 1963) says that previous scholars
and their works had already dealt with certain aspects
of mythology and it associations with their study of
Melville's works--Henry Murray's editorship of a
_Pierre_; Walter Bezanson's editorship of _Clarel_;

Howard Horsford's editorship of _Journal of a Visit
to Europe and the Levant_, and "most important,
Howard Vincent and Luther Mansfield's _Moby-Dick_"
(all of these particular editions--except Horsford--
had been published by Hendricks House, and are
excellent not only for their "Introductions" but
also for their copious "Explanatory Notes" in the back).
To give the potential reader and/or buyer of this
work an idea of Franklin's views, the titles of his
chapters are: Melville and the Gods; Mardi--A Study
of Myths and Mythmaking; Moby-Dick--An Egyptian Myth
Incarnate [what about the fact that Vishnu is cited
as the grand-master of all whalers in _Moby-Dick_,
oops!]; Pierre--The Petrification of Myth; Worldly
Safety and Other-Worldly Saviors---Bartleby, The
Ascetic's Advent,--Benito Cereno, The Ascetic's
Agony,--The Ascetics' Allegorical Masquerade;
The Confidence-Man--The Destroyer's Eastern
Masquerade; Billy Budd; or, Bili-Budd--The Last
Avatar; and The Wake of the Gods.
Franklin lays down an interesting purple carpet
for us to enter the palace upon (as long as we
keep looking all round us...and especially watch
our backs, and don't climb in any cauldrons or
tubs to bathe!): "Since all myth is by definition
fictional[hmm...is it? what about the historical
or ritual elements it may be covering up or
transmuting?], no one should be surprised to find
that literary fiction is mythic. Literary fiction
does essentially the same thing as primitive mythic
fiction: both tell made-up stories [you know he
is going to irritate me, if he keeps this up!]about
the human and natural worlds and both implicitly assign
a high order of truth to those made-up stories." ...
[He goes on to say that the myths we have, come to
us from "higly developed civilizations" (the very
Romantic idealist fallacy --not Classical idealist!--
that Jane Harrison so brilliantly and tellingly
disputes in her _Prolegomena_).]
Franklin goes on: "This study, rather than tracing
Melville's knowledge of mythology, tries to show how
Melville consciously used myths, mythology, comparative
mythology, and mythological theories in his major
works --Mardi, Moby-Dick, Piere, Bartleby, Benito
Cereno, The Confidence-Man, and Billy Budd. My
central thesis is that Melville's mythology determines
and defines large parts of the structure and meaning
of these works." (p. ix). Franklin also examines the
use of or Melville's deflection of "Christian myth," and
cites such previous examinations of this aspect as
William Braswell's _Melville's Religious Thought_;
Nathalia Wright's _Melville's Use of the Bible_.
The final EXCELLENT feature of this work is the fact
that Franklin has compiled "A Selected Index of
Non-Judaic-Christian Gods, Myths, and Religions in
Melville's Works" in which the gods, goddesses, spirits,
or terms ["Polynesian religion", for example] are
listed in alphabetical order, and the works [plus
page numbers or chapter numbers] where the term is
found in the work are also listed. This is in the
back of the volume.
* * * * * * * * *

One of the best sci-fi books written about nuclear war. Someone could make a fortune if they would make this book into a movie. (Ron Howard, are you out there?) This book is up there with "1984", "Fahrenheit 451" and "War of the Worlds". This book should be on every high school reading list. Do not pass up a chance at reading this book. There is only one problem if you do read it. You will NEVER forget it!!!!!!!

I read this book as a teenager and found it a sobering story. The reader must keep a certain detachment, remembering that the author is in part using his imagination. Although it may seem less topical now than when it was first published in the late 1950's, the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the USSR have reduced but not eliminated the nuclear threat. Roshwald paints a stark portrait of what could happen, which I took for what it was: a though-provoking warning to mankind. A great read which I highly recommend -- just keep in mind that it's fiction.

I read this book over 30 years ago and it has stayed with me all these years. If there was ever a nuclear war most people that died would never know who started it or why it happened.

More BS from a true red commie. One fails to mention the 1950 conference in Moscow with Stalin, Mao, and Uncle Ho where they plotted the war. This imbessile's lies are completely refuted by Vietnam: The Necessary War. This book is selective history. Not all factors that lead into and event are represented, only hogwash from a nostalgic hippie. He is the part of the same group of people that distorted the infamous napalm burned girl picture. That girl was hit by napalm from an aircraft piloted by a South Vietnamese pilot in where also a few ARVN soldiers were killed. But for some reason nuts like this guy called it American barbarism. His ilk also left out the caption the South Vietnamese photgrapher wrote on the bottom of the picture.

"This never would have happened if the Communists stayed in the North."

As a Vietnamese living in America, I have always been puzzled by different historical accounts of what went on during the Vietnam war. One account was what I learnt while growing up there. Another account was the Vietnam that many Americans know from the media. This book explained some of those differences well. The two Viet Nam (North and South), the gulf of Ton Kin incidence, the liberal press, antiwar activists spitting on returning GI, and the emotionally afflicting POW/MIA myth were the few fabrications concocted by various imperialistic American administrations. With the help of the jingoistic corporate press, they brainwashed the ill informed American public to garner support for the genocidal war in southeast Asia. Four million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians died from the "good intentions" of the United States.
Americans may have a free press. But are Americans free from the bias, prejudice, and bigotry of men who decide "all the news that's fit to print" and what is fit for us to read? Read the book and make up thy own mind.

This book provides a gripping examination of how the Right has redefined "Vietnam" (a war, not a country). Franklin reviews the horrors inflicted by the United States on the people of Vietnam, and shows how our culture has made us the victims. He shows how the famous photo of the Saigon Chief of Police executing an enemy prisoner has been reversed in movies showing Americans POWs in cages with the gun to their heads. He reminds those who would blame the anti-war movement for our failure, that every President from Truman to Nixon ran as a peace candidate, knowing the American public would never support the war. He discusses the first American anti-Vietnam-war protests, in 1945. Franklin himself was fired from a tenured position at Stanford for his stand against the University's involvement in making napalm, a truly horrific weapon which has only been used against people of color. He reveals that Nixon's need to prolong the war and declare victory by focusing on the Americans unaccounted for (extremely few though they were) led to the creation of the post-war POW/MIA myth. This myth, never substantiated, has justified our refusal to pay Vietnam the reparations we promised in the Paris Peace Treaty and our longstanding lack of diplimatic relations with the country. This book explains the war and its cultural fallout better than anything I've read. Reading this book made me truly alarmed for the lack of democracy in the United States.

Who would have thunk it? Jack London, author of "Call of the Wild," wrote a fantasy novel about a socialist revolution in America at the turn of the century. The tired socialist diatribes that form the bulk of this novel are laughable today, but still it's an interesting story. Perhaps even more interesting is that fact that this book, which glorifies socialism, may have been the inspiration for a book that glorifies facism: "The Turner Diaries." And that book, of course, is believed by some to have been the "blueprint" for the Oklahoma City bombing. Fortunately, London's fantasy didn't come true in America, but it did in Russia... and millions of lives were lost as a result.

Jack London gives a chillingly realistic tale of the rise of "The Iron Heel", which is a term for the capitalists who control some 75%-90% of the wealth of the world and use it to keep power. When Ernest and Avis Everhard try to lead a socialist revolution, The Iron Heel steps up and attempts to crush it. The Iron Heel mercylisly slaughters the proletariat and the socialists. While Eric Blair's (George Orwell) 1984 was a great warning and Zamyatin's We was frighteningly logical, London's The Iron Heel is unquestioningly the most realistic of the genre.

With "The Iron Heel," Jack London does a much better job of predicting today's world than George Orwell's book "1984." London depicts a world where government serves the business community, not the people, and there has been an incredible concentration in the ownership of the means of communication and the media. Speak out against this and the iron heel crushes you.

This book is an exciting, political adventure romance that you can't put down -- as long as you get through the first 40 pages of downright boring socialist polemics. If you want to really understand where we are headed, read "The Iron Heel" it today. Hard to believe it was written in 1906.

This book brings together short stories by largely canonical American authors--people we all read in school such as Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville. What Franklin has done brilliantly is shown, by the way he has collected the stories, how much they share a developing science fiction sensibility. Franklin also offers introductions to the stories and authors that are well written and intelligent, but here is also the source of my only complaint: I wish the introductions were slightly shorter, leaving room to include a few more stories. Still, this is an excellent anthology, one that will interest both converted science fiction fans and those who restrict themselves to reading that counts as "virtuous."

As usual, Professor Franklin's interpretations are off-base due to his obsessive-compulsive readings of the texts. While many of the works collected herein are deserving of attention and can stand on their own, Franklin's one-note thought process and style ruins one's enjoyment of them. Apparently this is a problem for all of Franklin's works, and the courses he teaches, which often ignore the text and the human reality in favor of his (frequently cardboard leftist) theory du jour.

This is no way for a humanist to behave, and of course ultimately it hurts the causes he himself espouses. And most likely the humans he hopes to help. Criminals, after all, are not cartoon cut-outs who spout whatever it is Franklin wishes to hear.

A reader/professor based in Cambridge, Mass.

H. Bruce Franklin has assembled a remarkable collection of prose and poetry from America's most silenced corner. As a survey of prison literature (both poetry and prose), it educates and questions; as truth from America's most oppressed class of citizens, it is soul-shaking and heart-rending. The selections expose the ugly face of American justice, but also put human faces on its many victims. These days, it isn't popular to want to give prisoners anything, even credit for writing such powerful words. Yet their power cannot be denied. The men and women whose work appears in this book write to communicate their shattered lives with all the passion of any writer in the free world. Their words, sharp as razor wire, are hard to forget, and I commend Mr. Franklin for putting together such an unusual and revealing anthology.

H. Bruce Franklin has done us a great service by providing us with insights into American society which most of us are too busy or too myopic to see clearly. Franklin's selection of works by America's prisoners from Melville to Malcolm X from O'Henry to Hogan provides a view of America from those who were marginalized by the dominent society. It is important that we as a people see and understand these observations and take them to heart. The introduction by Tom Wicker is as disturbing as some of the collected writings. Wicker, the noted journalist who covered the Attica Riots for the New York Times, lists the hard facts about the prisons of the 1990's. Crammed into warehouses, overcrowded, ignored by social services, the new prisoners are victims of a get tough drug policy which has quadrupled the number of inmates in the United States in the past twenty years, despite a decrease in the overall crime rate. America, the lagest consumer of drugs in the world, is also the largest incarcerator for drug users. Our unenlightened policy has resulted in the United States having more prisoners behind bars that any other nation in the world, including the former Soviet Union. It certainly explains our much bragged about low unemployment rate as well. With two million of our young men locked away in prison, the percentage around to be unemployed is drastically reduced. A boom economy. The unfortunate result of this domestic policy (discounting of course, the two million in prison) are our free young people who are denied adequate educational facilities because prison funds are a priority in the state budget. More and more, prisons are big business: good for construction, good for local employment, good for the politician's statistics, and good for the deep pockets of the correctional specialists. The damage our national prison policy is causing to the fabric of our nation is incalculable and will continue to cause damage for generations to come. Professor Franklin has done his country a great service. But, as previous reviews have shown, many of his fellow citizens would like to ignore this problem and put it out of sight, much like they have agreed to do with two million of their fellow citizens. Shades of the gulag. The delight of this book, however, is that the prisoners'writing shows that, despite being marginalized, despite being crowded, abused, and left to rot in a system of "indeterminate sentences," some men and women continue to not only preserve their souls, but actually create art and with it the power to move the rest of us to truly see and feel. We are not surprised that the caged bird can sing. We are surprised (to our shame) that it sings so well.

The collection of essays and official documents comprising this Vietnam history book can be quite a challenge to negotiate, perhaps even for the most serious Vietnam War readers. Personally, I recall reading this book during my (horrible) recovery from having my wisdom teeth removed, which provided the very ironic context for my pushing through the numerous essays, government documents, and accounts presented by the editors. For me, being someone who reads Vietnam War history as a hobby, it was one of those books that I knew was highly valuable while I was reading it, yet this type of enjoyment was often not accompanied by the "can't put it down" type of reading experience.
Overall, however, I would say that the richness, diversity, and balance of the material serves to compensate for any deficiencies the book might have in the excitement and engrossment arena. I often find myself referring back to the book while reading other Vietnam works. I would therefore recommend this book, but with the strong caveat that it should only be taken on if one is prepared to move through the heavy, sometimes even "boring" material in order to reap the substantial benefits yielded by this effort.

Full of primary source materical, Vietnam in America provides an amazing amount of information on the events leading up to and the involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War. Whether its abstracts from Ho Chi Minh or CIA incursion force leaders, this book contains a great deal of data not to be found in other like works. A tough reader, this book is not suggested for casual reading and should be used for the diehard history buff or for research material.