Black Virgin Mountain: A Return to Vietnam - Softcover

"A brilliant, masterful piece of writing. . . . Loving, smart, angry, tender, blunt, heartbreaking, tough, edgy, funny, bitter, redemptive, and so incredibly well-written. . . . Black Virgin Mountain, I promise, will endure."-Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried"No American novelist has written about the profound issues of military combat better than Larry Heinemann. Now he has written--in that ravishingly dynamic narrative voice that is distinctly his own--the finest memoir to come from the Vietnam War." -Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain"Heinemann [is]. . . some would say, the best writer of the Vietnam generation. . . . [Black Virgin Mountain] puts the Vietnam War in the context of America's other wars, at least in regard to what any war does to its veterans." -Los Angeles Times"An excellent gateway to the war and its impact on families, American and Vietnamese. Heinemann takes the reader on an extraordinary journey of reconciliation both for himself and for Vietnam."-Chicago Sun-Times

In 1967 Larry Heinemann was sent to Vietnam as an ordinary soldier. It was the most horrific year of his life, truly altering him—and his family—forever. In his powerful memoir, Heinemann returns to Vietnam, riding the train from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh city and confronting the memories of his war year. Black Virgin Mountain confirms Heinemann’s legendary plain-spoken reputation as one of the essential chroniclers of our war in Vietnam