To What End: Report From Vietnam - Softcover

Just, Ward

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1891620770 ISBN 13: 9781891620775

Publisher: PublicAffairs, 2000

Synopsis

"As a young man, Ward Just spent eighteen months in Vietnam as a correspondent for the Washington Post. The experience would earn him both a citation from the Overseas Press Club and a Combat Infantrym"

About this title

Review:

This reportorial classic on the Vietnam War, rereleased on the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, is a concise and atmospheric account of the war-torn country in 1966 and 1967. A writer for The Washington Post, Ward Just pumped out this slender volume in a few weeks following his journalistic tour of duty. Vietnam, he says in a new foreword, "was the war where you sympathized with your countrymen even as you doubted the wisdom of their actions, and the cause for which they fought (and the anti-war protestors were not much admired, either, at least by me)." To What End has no linear narrative; it is rather a series of loosely connected essays and anecdotes, full of dazzling insights. Just turns a comment on Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, into a sharp observation of Vietnamese culture:

The city held little of the symbolic value for the Vietnamese that Rome does for the Italians or London for the British.... Educated Vietnamese, when they thought about it at all, regarded Saigon as a synthetic city dominated by foreigners and ruled by a junta of generals... a non-capital, unrepresentative, artificial. The center of Vietnamese political life was the village; everything else was bureaucracy.

After To What End, Just went on to write several well-received novels (Echo House, A Dangerous Friend). This is no ordinary history of the war, but for a powerful sense of it, Just is hard to beat. --John J. Miller

About the Author:

In a foreword to the new PublicAffairs edition, Just reflects on Vietnam, on himself as a young man, and on how his views have and haven't changed since he wrote this sharply observed, sad, beautiful, and still disturbing book.

Ward Just is the author of twelve novels, including, most recently, A Dangerous Friend and the National Book Award finalist Echo House. Just was recently named one of the first recipients of a Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy there. He lives in Martha's Vineyard with his wife, Sarah Catchpole.

About this edition

• Publisher: PublicAffairs
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1891620770
• ISBN 13: 9781891620775
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 179