Description
Book SynopsisBetween 1962 and 1971, the U.S. military sprayed approximately twenty million gallons of Agent Orange and other chemical defoliants on Vietnam and Laos. This collection of twelve short stories by Vietnamese writers reveals this tragic legacy and raises troubling moral questions about the physical, spiritual, and environmental consequences of war.
Trade ReviewThis unique and remarkable book more than deserves the widest nationwide reading and strong recognition. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. Air Force extensively sprayed the enemy's jungle and rural countryside with a chemical defoliant known as Agent Orange to deprive the Vietcong of forest cover. However, Agent Orange was then well-known to be heavily contaminated with dioxin, the most potent known human carcinogen. The pain of agonizing diseases, cancers, and deaths in small towns and villages is told in their own words, by victims or their family members, in heart moving, yet non-accusatory detachment against the U.S. chemical warfare." — Samuel S. Epstein, M.D., Chairman, Cancer Prevention Coalition and Professor Emeritus University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health.
“The editors have included some of the best-known contemporary authors in Vietnam in this intelligently selected and well-translated collection of essays concerning the inevitable suffering caused by Agent Orange. Their combined voices allow us to share some of the pain and human consequences that resulted from a war against the environment itself, and inexorably, agonizingly, remind us of our connection to, and responsibility for, that damage. It is only through the intimacy of imaginative literature that one can begin to experience the depth of that destruction and the wreckage of individual lives.” — Wayne Karlin, author of
Wandering Souls: Journeys with the Dead and the Living in Viet Nam.
