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Viet Thanh Nguyen

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Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War Kindle Edition

by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.3 241 ratings

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Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award
Finalist, National Book Award in Nonfiction
A New York Times Book Review “The Year in Reading” Selection

All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. From the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Sympathizer comes a searching exploration of the conflict Americans call the Vietnam War and Vietnamese call the American War—a conflict that lives on in the collective memory of both nations.

“[A] gorgeous, multifaceted examination of the war Americans call the Vietnam War—and which Vietnamese call the American War…As a writer, [Nguyen] brings every conceivable gift—wisdom, wit, compassion, curiosity—to the impossible yet crucial work of arriving at what he calls ‘a just memory’ of this war.”
—Kate Tuttle, Los Angeles Times

“In Nothing Ever Dies, his unusually thoughtful consideration of war, self-deception and forgiveness, Viet Thanh Nguyen penetrates deeply into memories of the Vietnamese war…[An] important book, which hits hard at self-serving myths.”
—Jonathan Mirsky, Literary Review

“Ultimately, Nguyen’s lucid, arresting, and richly sourced inquiry, in the mode of Susan Sontag and W. G. Sebald, is a call for true and just stories of war and its perpetual legacy.”
—Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

Print length

381 pages
Language

English
Sticky notes

On Kindle Scribe
Publisher

Harvard University Press
Publication date

April 11 2016
File size

7945 KB
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Viet Thanh Nguyen
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Product description

About the Author

Viet Thanh Nguyen is Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. His novel The Sympathizer won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Review

“[Nguyen] produces close readings of the novels, films, monuments, and prisons that form ‘the identity of war’ in Vietnam, ‘a face with carefully drawn features, familiar at a glance to the nation’s people.’ Nguyen draws insights from Levinas, Ricoeur, and other philosophers, and his approach has affinities with that of hybridists such as W. G. Sebald and Maggie Nelson. The book is also notable for its inclusivity, addressing Cambodian, Laotian, Hmong, and Korean experiences and the competition for narrative dominance in bookstores and box offices.”―New Yorker

“In Nothing Ever Dies, Nguyen has written a powerful meditation on the manner in which memories are produced, cultivated, even empowered and subdued…He’s a lucid and robust voice for the forgotten―forgotten people, forgotten places, and forgotten memories most of all…Nothing Ever Dies is one man’s powerful entreaty to a country which has seen nearly endless conflict (one war running upon the next) for generations.”―Matthew Snider, PopMatters

“Readers will discover the roots of Nguyen’s powerful fiction in this profoundly incisive and bracing investigation into the memory of war and how war stories are shaped and disseminated…Ultimately, Nguyen’s lucid, arresting, and richly sourced inquiry, in the mode of Susan Sontag and W. G. Sebald, is a call for true and just stories of war and its perpetual legacy.”―Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

“Nguyen’s work is a powerful reflection on how we choose to remember and forget.”―Kirkus Reviews

“This thought-provoking book is recommended for all students of the Vietnam War and those interested in historical memory.”―Joshua Wallace, Library Journal

“[An] eloquent…narrative of the Vietnam War’s psychological impact on combatants and civilians…This is primarily a work that comes to grips with memory and identity through the arts…Nguyen succeeds in delivering a potent critique of the war and revealing what the memories of living have meant for the identities of the next generation.”―Publishers Weekly

“Is there hope for an ethics of memory, or for peace? Nothing Ever Dies reveals that, in our collective memories of conflict, we are still fighting the Forever War. Nguyen’s distinctive voice blends ideas with family history in a way that is original, unique, exciting. A vitally important book.”―Maxine Hong Kingston, author of To Be a Poet

“Inspired by the author’s personal odyssey, informed by his wide-ranging exploration of literature, film, and art, this is a provocative and moving meditation on the ethics of remembering and forgetting. Rooted in the Vietnam War and its aftermath, it speaks to all who have been displaced by war and revolution, and carry with them memories, whether their own or of others, private or collective, that are freighted with nostalgia, guilt, and trauma.”―Hue-Tam Ho Tai, editor of The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam

“Nothing Ever Dies provides the fullest and best explanation of how the Vietnam War has become so deeply inscribed into national memory. Nguyen’s elegant prose is at once deeply personal, sweepingly panoramic, and hauntingly evocative.”―Ari Kelman, author of A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek

“Beautifully written, powerfully argued, thoughtful, provocative.”―Marilyn B. Young, author of The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990

“In Nothing Ever Dies, his unusually thoughtful consideration of war, self-deception and forgiveness, Viet Thanh Nguyen penetrates deeply into memories of the Vietnamese war…[An] important book, which hits hard at self-serving myths.”―Jonathan Mirsky, Literary Review

“By taking the reader on a sweeping and sobering global tour of artifacts, places, art, texts, and monuments associated with Vietnam, Nguyen argues that our cultural need to reflect accurately upon our history and fully absorb its lessons is forever at war with the impossibility of ever fully knowing the truth, or retelling it accurately…Cautioning that we cannot remember what we do not see, he lists the ways in which the U.S. has failed to fully recognize its own role in Vietnam, let alone the Vietnamese citizens it ostensibly went to Vietnam to protect…It’s fitting that Nothing Ever Dies has emerged at a moment when the U.S. and most of Europe are fiercely questioning America’s ability to reconcile with the past. Nguyen might say that the only way we can truly acknowledge the past is to contend with how fallible our memories actually are.”―Aja Romano, Vox

“Nothing Ever Dies is an account of humanity at its darkest, a realm of war, memory, identity and pain that ventures from the jungles of Vietnam to the killing fields of Cambodia.”―Jeffrey Fleishman, Los Angeles Times

“A penetrating analysis by the Pulitzer Prize–winning Nguyen on how the Vietnam War has been remembered by the countries and people that have been most affected by it.”―Listener

“In this elegantly written book, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Nguyen offers a comprehensive, balanced analysis of how the Vietnam War has been remembered and forgotten―both privately and collectively…Examining a medley of cultural forms―novels, monuments, cemeteries, souvenirs, video games, photography, museum exhibits, and movies―Nguyen calls attention to the inequality in the industrial production of memory and to the power of art to disable future wars. One of the book’s most original―and perhaps controversial―arguments is that to avoid simplifying the other, people need to recognize both their humanity and their ever-present inhumanity and those of others as well.”―Y. L. Espiritu, Choice

“[A] gorgeous, multifaceted examination of the war Americans call the Vietnam War―and which Vietnamese call the American War…As a writer, [Nguyen] brings every conceivable gift―wisdom, wit, compassion, curiosity―to the impossible yet crucial work of arriving at what he calls ‘a just memory’ of this war.”―Kate Tuttle, Los Angeles Times

“Impassioned yet forensic.”―Peter Pierce, The Australian --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01DBP4YVG
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harvard University Press; Illustrated edition (April 11 2016)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 7945 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 381 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0674979842

Best Sellers Rank: #432,202 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #104 in Historiography (Kindle Store)
- #120 in Southeast Asian History
- #250 in Vietnamese History (Kindle Store)

Customer Reviews:
4.3 241 ratings

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Viet Thanh Nguyen

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Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He is the author of The Committed, which continues the story of The Sympathizer, awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, alongside seven other prizes. He is also the author of the short story collection The Refugees; the nonfiction book Nothing Ever Dies, a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; the children's book Chicken of the Sea, with his son Ellison and with Thi Bui and Hien Bui-Stafford; and is the editor of an anthology of refugee writing, The Displaced. He is a University Professor and the Aerol Arnold Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. He lives in Los Angeles.

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Amazon Customer

A deeply thought provoking book in which the author describes ...

Reviewed in Canada on June 4, 2018

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A deeply thought provoking book in which the author describes how memories of events are shaped and even distorted by the individual and/ or a society and how social media serves as tools of propaganda-wonderful account of the ethics of remembering and how perception of others as human/inhuman influences memories. Clear value of recognition of elements of human and inhuman in every individual

2 people found this helpful

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B. Joseph

Compelling

Reviewed in Canada on March 18, 2018

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A detailed, layered and compelling read. Brings heretofore uncovered elements of the conflict into focus. Highly recommended.

One person found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

It's a book about how white America should feel bad about the Vietnam War

Reviewed in Canada on February 26, 2018

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It's a book about how white America should feel bad about the Vietnam War. The book tries to guilt trip the audience into believing its politically correct narrative. Rather than showing that it is the author's own narrative, it dresses itself as a scholar piece of work. As a Vietnamese, I don't think you will get a true Vietnamese soldiers' narrative here.

2 people found this helpful

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Frederick Ward

Five Stars

Reviewed in Canada on October 22, 2016

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Wonderful knowledge we need

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The Cries of the Heart Heard in History

Reviewed in Canada on March 13, 2017

Professor Nguyen has become a celebrated voice of sorts for all that modern war inspires or effects in the human psyche. In this poignant, in-depth, lyrical study, he examines many of the ugly images or memes that have become a part of the Vietnam War legacy, irrespective of sides. He does not subscribe to the traditional view that those most directly impacted by the ravages and carnage of such conflicts eventually find ways to bury their pain and move on. Something very terrible happened to Vietnam - North and South - back in the sixties, and nothing we can do or say will ever erase the presence of those haunting moments or spaces of emptiness that Nguyen refers to as ghosts lurking in the recesses of our subconsciousness. Even if we try to lose them in finely contrived narratives of national heroism, they often have a way of being exposed. All in all, he takes his readers on a tour of battle sites, monuments, cemeteries, museums, and shocking moments in time looking for how both sides handle the grim realities of large-scale killing. While the trauma is obvious for friend or foe, how they handle it reflects a significant parting of the ways. When the Americans pulled out in 1973, they left behind a country badly divided, with over a million dead, and virtually impoverished. How Vietnam has chosen to deal with the physical and mental scarring resulting from this bloodbath speaks to how it sees its identity in history: a carefully scripted re-enactment of a struggle to survive against a ruthless foreign invader, the United States. By contrast, the US has attempted to bury the shame of its defeat by finding other wars to fight. No apologies or feelings of regret because its leaders still see the war as one big heroic necessity that comes from being button-holed for service in the cause of freedom. Both national scenarios, according to Nguyen, ring hollow when one considers how far they are from the daily grind and horrors of war. I found the stories of common citizens and soldiers as to how they coped with what was really the dirtiest and most absurd of wars to be the most compelling part of this book. Both the graphic and creative portrayal of inhumanity - a lot racially incited - underscore the incredible and lasting damage that the Vietnam conflict has done to its people. Sure, the American military establishment went back home to restart their narrative elsewhere on another third world society, but what it left behind as a legacy will never die because it is etched deep in the minds of those most directly impacted by it, notwithstanding efforts to sanitize it. I have a friend who still suffers serious flashbacks from having served two cycles as a Green Beret in Vietnam, and that was over forty years ago.

5 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Dwight Braxton

Superb account of Vietnam before the US war

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 11, 2022

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I had read Logevall's superb biography (Part 1) of JFK, and was highly impressed by his literary style and the depth of his research. "Embers of War", which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013, is another brilliantly-written and very powerful account, dealing with the brutal mismanagement by France of Indochina in the late 1800s and the first half of the 20th Century, leading up to the point where the US became involved in large measure after the French capitulated at the disastrous battle of Dien Bien Phu. Logevall presents this account as reflecting the American paranoia at the time about countries falling like dominos to Communist influence, and almost accidentally ending up propping up colonial power in Vietnam. Interestingly, Ho Chi Minh is presented in a somewhat sympathetic manner, and it is the French who come across as callous, indifferent and utterly incompetent in their approach to dealing with the Vietnamese. A superb book, thoroughly recommended.

Amazon Customer

Fantastic journey through ethics of memory, storytelling, and war

Reviewed in the United States on April 11, 2022

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A resource for art, for philosophical perspectives on the importance of art, how to think about ourselves, others, and the future of our relationships with each other.

I find it extremely difficult to explain the feelings that this book stirred in me. I haven’t read anything else by the author, though I’m sure I will.
The closest I can come to explaining how this book made me feel is that it feels more impactful on me now than my first encounter with Vonnegut when I was 17.

I really. Really love the idea of a citizen of the imagination, rather than a cosmopolitan citizen of a global state.

Unreasonable yet necessary Hope in the face of inhumanity and an industry of dehumanization for profit. I don’t know what I can say about this book beyond the feelings it stirred in me. I hope more people read this book. Or at least that the ideas from and around this book can inspire more people to imagine others as we do ourselves.

Thank you.

3 people found this helpful

ElizabethM

An Engaging and Empowering Read.

Reviewed in the United States on September 28, 2016

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Nothing Ever Dies, Vietnam and the Memory of War offers many riches. With great erudition and impeccable scholarship, Viet Thanh Nguyen shows us how the traumatic repercussions of war defy simplification, and how facile it is to misremember the dead. Focusing on the American war in Vietnam, and referencing other conflicts (Korea, Cambodia, the Philippines), the author challenges us to extend our understanding and compassion to participants and victims on both sides of the battlefield. By remembering others, we expand and enrich our own stance.

Growing up in post-war Europe, I absorbed a good dose of aversion to the Germans and the Russians. Years later, while Europe was uniting and setting out to reconcile old enemies, I was relieved not to have to blame and point the finger any longer. After moving to Canada, I succumbed to the American version of the war in Vietnam by watching the movies (Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, etc.) and reading the literary war accounts (Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Michael Herr’s Dispatches, and others). I admired their artistry but seldom questioned the American one-sidedness.

Reading Nothing Ever Dies, meant revisiting the shameful conflict within an expanded Vietnamese-American context to great personal enrichment. Particularly superb are the chapters showing how the “industries of memory” (books, TV, movies) constrain our ethical vision by practicing political partisanship and exclusion. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s analytical depth and boundless intellect are here on full display. A biography of 22 pages of “Works Cited” attests to his curiosity and rigour. The book is compelling not least because the author weaves the painful, valiant, and ultimately fortunate trajectory of his family (from a hardscrabble village in northern Vietnam, via refugee camps, to prosperous California) into the broader framework of his inquiry.

Nothing Ever Dies challenges us to cultivate a more compassionate sensibility and to recognize that each one of us is capable of being human and also inhuman. An engaging and empowering read.

72 people found this helpful

Tom M

Thought Provoking Well Beyond This Country and This War

Reviewed in the United States on March 16, 2019

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I enjoyed this book at two levels. Having traveled in and out of Vietnam regularly over the past 30 years, I enjoyed finding validation of many of my own thoughts on Vietnam (the country not the war) and at the same time, I enjoyed the opportunity to better grasp the universal nature of wars and the systematic post-war re engineering of history to fit a desired perception of those wars.

This book, in a lot of ways, is the non fiction version of the message(s) this author embedded in his novel, the Sympathizer, and, serves as a study guide (in a good way) of the Sympathizer. Reading the book reminded me of the learning experience one has in school when studying a classic novel. That said, if you are planning to read both this book and the Sympathizer, read the Sympathizer first so as not to spoil the mental exercise of finding your way to the message of the novel.

All in, the authors views are well grounded, his messages resonate and, although the focus in on Vietnam, the conclusions have a universal application. This is a well thought out and well written book well worth the read whether or not you have any interest in Vietnam.

6 people found this helpful

Patrick Mc Coy

Interesting Analysis of War and Memory

Reviewed in the United States on April 11, 2019

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Not long ago I read Viet Thanh Nguyen's prize winning debut novel The Sympathizers and enjoyed it. So I decided to read his non-fiction Vietnam book, Nothing Ever Dies (2016), while in Vietnam recently. It is along and detailed mediation on the Vietnam War and how it is situated in people's memory. The book is organized in several sections: Ethics, Industries, and Aesthetics. There is a remarkable list of references throughout the book-some which would have thought to be tangentially related to Vietnam, but that coupled with memory broadens the scope of the book to make it very inclusive. Some references used by Nguyen include the obvious-references to famous movie like Apocalypse Now! and Causalities of War and famous books on the war such as Bao Ninh's The Sorrows of War and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. Some of the more less relevant references included James Baldwin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Milan Kundera, Toni Morrison, Elaine Scarry, Flannery O'Connor, Art Spiegelman and many, many more. It is very much a though-provoking look at the Vietnam War and how it is remembered.

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Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War Kindle Edition

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