The Names of the Dead

Rating:
Summary: Falters and wavers
Review: I'm very glad that so many readers liked this book, and that it's been a good one for Vietnam vets. But I felt that this book never found its way. It felt like snapshots from a depressive life, intermingled with a thriller. I guess it just didn't work for me as literature, or as a thriller. I was was drawn to O'Nan by his work in Granta 54, but I probably won't try him again.

Rating:
Summary: i loved it!!!!``
Review: In the beginning I was pretty ambivalent with it, found the war scenes hard to read and stay with - but I kept with it and the more I read, the deeper I became drawn in. On all levels the book was real and deep. The writing was fabulous and beautiful. I think for the 1st time vietnam became very very real to me, the horror of it and the bonds the people who were there fighting made with one another and how incredibly hard it was for them to return to life here after there. The book moved me alot.

Rating:
Summary: Dealing with incurable illness
Review: Stewart O'Nan plunges the reader into the chambers of horrors that are the aftermath of Vietnam. He understands the razoredge tension of being underfire, the hopelessness of being without the security of even minimal coping that eats the brains of many Vietnam Vets, and he knows the vagaries of the promised paths of healing from physical and mental war wounds. Some writers describe actual moments of battle contact better than O'Nan but few dig into the battle rattle that so chronically impaled the men and boys who came home from Vietnam. And with all this ammunition on board, O'Nan has written a very fine novel that is, yes, grounded in the sequelae of war, but succeeds in unraveling a fascinating story of at least one man's survival. This is a pithy book and deserves to be placed on the shelf along with O'Brien, Caputo, Turner and the other fine writers who still struggle to make sense out of the irrational Vietnam error.