Description: "All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. Exploring how this troubled memory works in Vietnam, the United States, Laos, Cambodia, and South Korea, the book deals specifically with the Vietnam War and also war in general. He reveals how war is a part of our identity, as individuals and as citizens of nations armed to the teeth. Venturing through literature, film, monuments, memorials, museums, and landscapes of the Vietnam War, he argues that an alternative to nationalism and war exists in art, created by artists who adhere to no nation but the imagination."--Provided by publisher.
Brief description: Viet Thanh Nguyen is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, Nothing Ever Dies, and To Save and to Destroy. A recipient of the MacArthur Foundation and Guggenheim fellowships and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Nguyen is a Writer in Residence at the University of Southern California.
Review Quotes: 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