A Dangerous Friend [Audio Cassette]

Ward Just (Author, Narrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2001

In this, his twelfth novel, Ward Just penetrates more deeply into America's role in the world than he has ever done before. This beautifully constructed large-canvas novel of Saigon in 1965 can be justly compared to Joseph Conrad's NOSTROMO or Graham Greene's THE QUIET AMERICAN. A DANGEROUS FRIEND is a thrilling narrative roiling with intrigue, mayhem, and betrayal. Here is the story of conscience and its consequences among those for whom Vietnam was neither the right fight nor the wrong fight but the only fight. The exotic tropical surroundings, the coarsening and corrupting effects of a colonial regime, the visionary delusions of the American democratizers, all play their part. In A DANGEROUS FRIEND, a few civilians with bright minds and sunny intentions want to reform Vietnam -- but the Vietnam they see isn't the Vietnam that is. Sydney Parade, a political scientist, has left home and family in an effort to become part of something larger than himself, a foreign-aid operation in Saigon. Even before he arrives, he encounters French and Americans who reveal to him the unsettling depths of a conflict he thought he understood -- and in Saigon, the Vietnamese add yet another dimension. Before long, the rampant missteps and misplaced ideals trap Parade and others in a moral crossfire.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Ward Just, a former war correspondent, uses his intimate knowledge of Vietnam to advantage in this exploration of America's tangled relations with that small Southeast Asian country. Set in 1965, the last year that civilians were in control of foreign intervention, A Dangerous Friend chronicles the lives of a small band of aid workers who purport to administer financial and technical assistance to the Vietnamese; unknown to most, however, the Llewellyn Group is actually covertly linked to the Pentagon. Though told by a nameless narrator, the protagonist of this story is Sydney Parade, an idealistic American who abandons wife and child in order to help bring democracy to the third world:

We worked harder than we had ever worked in our lives, or would ever work again. We were drunk on work. Work was passion. We were in it for the long haul, and from the beginning we swam upstream.

Sydney arrives in Vietnam filled with altruistic purpose, but all too soon he finds himself up to his neck in dangerous intrigue. The head of the Llewellyn Group, Dicky Rostok, is trolling for information, and he uses Sydney's connections with a French planter and his American-born wife to further his own agenda. Despite the best of intentions, Sydney unwittingly becomes the source of information that will eventually lead to death, betrayal, and ruin. In A Dangerous Friend Ward Just conveys the depth of America's misunderstanding of the situation in Vietnam even as he illustrates how idealism unleavened by knowledge can be a perilous thing, indeed. --Alix Wilber --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

With the appearance of his 12th novel, former journalist (and Vietnam reporter) Just (Echo House) has reason to be proud of the books he has produced, all of them thoughtful, judicious commentaries on the ironies inherent in politics, culture and human relationships. This trenchant work, set in 1965 Vietnam as the U.S. is inching toward full-scale war, may prove to be his most significant; certainly, it reflects with quiet understatement one of the central moral issues of our century. Its protagonist, Sydney Parade, is emblematic of the idealistic, dangerously na?ve Americans who felt it their mission to bring democracy to Southeast Asia. Recruited by Dicky RostokAthe brash, arrogant head of the Llewellyn Group, a foundation that purports to administer financial aid and technical assistance to Vietnam but is in reality a covert arm of Pentagon policyASydney leaves his wife and daughter in Darien, Conn., and travels to a country town near Saigon. Sydney is unaware of his vast ignorance of Vietnamese culture and political reality, but after he becomes involved with French expatriate and rubber plantation owner Claude Armand and his wife, Dede, a native Chicagoan, Sydney gradually loses his hubris. Eventually, he realizes that the American goal of "nation building" in Vietnam is at best a tragic delusion and at worst a cynical grasp at power. Almost accidentally, Sydney becomes the conduit for information about a U.S. Army captain captured by the VC. Ensuing events result in the annihilation of a village of innocent Vietnamese, betrayal of the Armands and the ruin of the one truly moral member of the Llewellyn staff. In spite of his good intentions, Sydney has become, as Dede Armand says, "a dangerous friend." Just gives readers an incisive vision of America's end of innocence. He does so with strongly limned characters who do not forfeit their individuality even as they are overwhelmed by history. Author tour.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Audio Cassette
• Publisher: Phoenix Audio (October 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590401190
• ISBN-13: 978-1590401194
• Shipping Information: View shipping rates and policies
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)

More About the Author

WARD JUST is the author of fifteen previous novels, including the National Book Award finalist Echo House, A Dangerous Friend, winner of the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for fiction from the Society of American Historians, and An Unfinished Season, winner of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award and a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Novel of 1999, October 20, 1999

By 

Noah Mass ([e-mail]) (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Dangerous Friend (Hardcover)

It's a shame that this novel wasn't a finalist for the National Book Award this year. It deserves the honor. A Dangerous Friend is utterly original in its portrait of the early years of American intervention in Vietnam. Ward Just perfectly captures the innocence, avarice, hubris, ignorance, and paranoia of the time. He liberates a genre that is, perhaps, exhausted, and at the very least, well-defined. A war novel without the physical violence (although there's plenty of the emotional kind), A Dangerous Friend captures the fine (sometimes irrelevent) distinctions between military and civilian, colonist and native, hero and villain. Simply, powerfully superb.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent novel of the early days of Vietnam, August 29, 2000

By 

Christopher A. Smith (Houston, TX) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Dangerous Friend (Hardcover)

A subtle, perfectly nuanced depiction of the early days of the Vietnam war. The tension of combat lingers through the book, but the bombings and firefights are largely kept to the background. What Ward Just creates is an authentic story of the civilians, soldiers and bureaucrats who laid the foundation for a war that would eventually become a catastrophic failure for the United States.

Just does an excellent job of showing the complexity of Vietnam; the bureaucrats vs the military, the new American imperialists vs the old French colonialists, nation-building vs firebombing.

The book centers around Sydney Parade, a sociologist sent to Vietnam to work with a somewhat mysterious government agency, the Llewellyn group, which is charged with collecting information and winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese though community projects. He is tasked with winning the cooperation of a French rubber planter and his American wife, relics of French colonialism who are living "between the lines" in an effort to avoid choosing sides and therefore becoming involved.

"We went to Vietnam because we wanted to." Explains the narrator. "We were not drafted. We were encouraged to volunteer and if our applications were denied, we applied again." Just captures the optimism, confusion, bureacracy, and overconfidence of America's early days in Vietnam, and we soon get a glimpse of the impending disillusionment.

Just covered the Vietnam war as a correspondent, and his first-hand familiarity with the conflict shows. An excellent novel.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Evocative, powerful prose, May 18, 2001

By 

Michael Albert Riccardi - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Dangerous Friend (Paperback)

"A Dangerous Friend" is the second best novel of its type, but that is high praise indeed, since it is only edged out by Graham Greene's "The Quiet American." Just's prose is a joy to read. He was a first-rate journalist in his younger days, and it shows. His economy with words and syntax is a marvel. Not a word is wasted, not a sentence tortured. Beyond that, the story is gripping and poignant. Just, like Greene before him, re-creates Vietnam on the page in a way that makes it startlingly real. The characters not only fulfill their symbolic function but also engage the reader on a human level. Finally, this is the book that makes you really feel what America did in Vietnam, as the U.S. is clearly the "Dangerous Friend" of the title.