Frank L Grzyb

To my knowledge, this is the first book I've ever read which contained a factual error in the second sentence. However, since I'm pledged to read a history of every state during the War of the Rebellion before my days are done, I persevered. The book is a series of vignettes; there is no flow, and only minimal chronological organization. Any such book will be only as interesting as the anecdotes, and various readers are inevitably going to find them of varying interest (not to mention finding different anecdotes to be the interesting ones). In general, few of these tickled my fancy; emphases include soldier life, of which there are many, and better, books, and mini-biographies of famous individuals of the day who had some connection with Little Rhody. In some cases, said connection is quite tenuous (i.e., Julia Ward Howe, not the most interesting personage to begin with, estivated there several years in her youth). Occasional rants, fueled by pedantry and logorrhea, which reached a nadir with an extended critique of how a particular photograph has been captioned in history books through the years, were offputting to say the least. And the book, in its final chapter, ended with a clunk by finally living up to its tabloidish title by recounting a series of supposedly eerie coincidences and hallucinations, all of which I found to be about as supernatural as instant pudding.… (más)

This book has the accounts of several people who served in Vietnam and who are all from the same county in Rhode Island. The experiences are grouped by topic like In-Country, Training, Being Wounded...
This book is not an analysis of the war or its place in the geopolitical landscape of the Cold War. It is simply how the war was viewed by a handful of (un)willing participants. This is the strength of this book because war to the individual isn't ideology and doctrine, but staying alive, seeing a friend die or trying to repair a body damaged by war.
Each account is short; the longest about 2 pages. The books ends with an entry about what happened to each person after the war.… (más)