Written on the front lines in Vietnam, Dispatches became an immediate classic of war reportage when it was published in 1977.
From its terrifying opening pages to its final eloquent words, Dispatches makes us see, in unforgettable and unflinching detail, the chaos and fervor of the war and the surreal insanity of life in that singular combat zone. Michael Herr’s unsparing, unorthodox retellings of the day-to-day events in Vietnam take on the force of poetry, rendering clarity from one of the most incomprehensible and nightmarish events of our time.
Dispatches is among the most blistering and compassionate accounts of war in our literature.
Editorial Reviews
"What a passionate, compassionate, brilliant book this is. With uncanny precision it summons up the very essence of that war--its space diction, its surreal psychology, its bitter humor--the dope, the dexedrine, the body bags, the rot, all of it....I believe it may be the best personal journal about war, any war, that any writer has ever accomplished." —Robert Stone, Chicago Tribune
"In the great line of Crane, Orwell, and Hemingway . . . Herr reaches an excruciating level of intensity . . . He seems to have brought to this book the ear of a musician and the eye of a painter . . . the premier war correspondence of Vietnam.” —The Washington Post
"We have all spent ten years trying to explain what happened to our heads and our lives in the decade we finally survived--but Michael Herr's Dispatches puts all the rest of us in the shade." —Hunter S. Thompson
"The best book I have ever read on men and war in our time." —John le Carré
About the Author
Michael Herr was a novelist and war correspondent. Born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1940, he began reporting from Vietnam for Esquire in the 1960s, during the height of the war. He later chronicled those experiences in his memoir, Dispatches. He is the author of three other books, The Big Room, Walter Winchell, and Kubrick, and coauthor of the screenplays for Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket. He died in 2016.
