A Dangerous Friend [Paperback]

Ward Just (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Boston: Houghton Mifflin,; Uncorrected proof. edition (1998)
• ASIN: B000U2IZ32
• 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.