Keep Your Head Down: Vietnam, the Sixties, and a Journey of Self-Discovery [Hardcover]

Doug Anderson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 13, 2009

An award-winning poet highlights the vibrant history of his generation in a farewell to Vietnam, the chaotic sixties, and their long aftermath.

“We tend to write about what will not go away,” Doug Anderson says in this candid, darkly humorous journey of self-discovery. Beginning in 1943, in the pre–civil rights South filled with tobacco and war stories, he recalls the difficult childhood that propels him into service in Vietnam. In 1967, having returned home deeply shaken by his experience as a combat medical corpsman, Anderson plunges into the heady freedoms and excesses of the sixties. His downward spiral—through booze, substance abuse, and sex—brings him dangerously close to a total breakdown. Finally, in a return group visit to Vietnam in 2000, he meets with former enemies now become writers and poets. Moved by the realization that “the last time I saw these people they were trying to kill me,” Anderson confronts the past and calls upon a story—this powerful story—to rebuild a life.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Anderson (The Moon Reflected Fire) has led an amazing life—before, during and after his 1967–1968 tour of duty as a navy corpsman with the 1st Marine Division in Vietnam. He has been a jazz drummer, a playwright, an actor, an alcoholic and son of an alcoholic, a college dropout, a college instructor, a drug abuser, a PTSD sufferer and a poet. In his first book of nonfiction, Anderson tells his story in inviting, poetic prose. He begins with his dysfunctional childhood in Memphis, then offers an evocative depiction of his service in Vietnam, which included a firefight on his first day in the field and more than his share of closely observed horror. He shows the hell of war as he went through it. Only in recent years did Anderson stop drinking, find meaningful work as a poet and teacher, marry and make a life-changing trip back to Vietnam in 2000. Yet what Anderson dubs Snakebrain (the demons inside him) remains a part of him. His beautifully told story is one of redemption, but also one without a happy ending. (July)
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Review

Starred Review. In his first book of nonfiction, Anderson tells his story in inviting, poetic prose. He begins with his dysfunctional childhood in Memphis, then offers an evocative depiction of his service in Vietnam, which included a firefight on his first day in the field and more than his share of closely observed horror. He shows the hell of war as he went through it. Only in recent years did Anderson stop drinking, find meaningful work as a poet and teacher, marry and make a life-changing trip back to Vietnam in 2000. Yet what Anderson dubs “Snakebrain” (the demons inside him) remains a part of him. His beautifully told story is one of redemption, but also one without a happy ending. (Publishers Weekly )

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (July 13, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393068552
• ISBN-13: 978-0393068559
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,098,839 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Doug Anderson has written two books of poems of which The Moon Reflected Fire won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and Blues for Unemployed Secret Police a grant from the Eric Matthieu King Fund of the Academy of American Poets. His play, Short Timers, was produced at New York's The Theater for The New City in 1981. He has written film scripts, fiction and criticism and is at present at work on a novel about human trafficking. He earned a Phd from the University of Connecticut and teaches at the Hartford campus. His awards include fellowships from the NEA, the Virginia Quarterly Review, Poets & Writers, Inc., The Massachusetts Artists Foundations, The MacDowell Colony and other funding organizations. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Massachusetts Review, The Connecticut Review, The Southern Review, Ploughshares and many other literary magazines.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A haunting memoir, July 7, 2009

By 

Mass Reader (Massachusetts) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Keep Your Head Down: Vietnam, the Sixties, and a Journey of Self-Discovery (Hardcover)

This book stayed with me long after I reluctantly finished it. Anderson is obviously a poet, and his prose shows that. His story is dark, poignant, honestly and beautifully told. Highly recommend this stunning memoir.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Snake being, July 11, 2009

By 

David Lenson (S Deerfield MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Keep Your Head Down: Vietnam, the Sixties, and a Journey of Self-Discovery (Hardcover)

Good god, what a book. I thought I'd "have a look" at it yesterday morning, and by the time the fire burned down at night's end I was done with it, and it was done with me. Never mind that Anderson's combat experiences were pretty much the most hellish of any of my vet friends' -- at least the ones who'll actually talk about them. Anderson's meditations about memory and history make me marvel at how well he's able to do it, even if it took a lifetime. More than that, there's no book about that era that recounts the war, the political resistance, and the counterculture, all from direct living of them. Robert Stone's book is a collection of fragments by comparison. A 2000 trip back to Vietnam somehow redeems a whole generation, playing in all three of those registers.

I love the ambiguous Snake being, not all bad or all good, perhaps proving more valuable as time goes by..... For all its redemptive ending, the book allowed me little sleep last night. I was afraid to go to sleep and see someone shooting pigs.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Keep Your Head Down, July 6, 2009

By 

crepedechine24 - See all my reviews

This review is from: Keep Your Head Down: Vietnam, the Sixties, and a Journey of Self-Discovery (Hardcover)

In this memoir, one finds a prose narrative that continues on with the themes found in his two extraordinary volumes of poetry, The Moon Reflected Fire and Blues for Unemployed Secret Police. Whether depicting the insanity of the Viet Nam war or the complexities of early adolescence, whether revisiting a hippie bash in Tucson or a pack of unslept marine corp officers in Que Son valley, whether immersed in the roiling connection between sex and love or lack thereof, Anderson's eye for the truth is equally tender and unsparing. This prose is unmarked with sentimentality yet charged with a heart whose course we are privileged to follow as it winds from childhood into early manhood as an artist and a veteran of war.