Customer Reviews

Vietnam Reflexes and Reflections

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These works of art tell so many strong and painful stories, I will never forget these images of a time (that I hope) will never be repeated.

Vietnam - the war we would all rather forget and bury, so painful are the memories and wounds it engendered on America and on Asia - is at last viewed from the standpoint of artists who lived it. This visually magnificent collection of works of art made by Vietnam Veterans, both while they were in Vietnam and in the tortured years subsequent to their return as "non-heroes", not only introduces for the first time another form of documentation about the Vietnam Experience. It provides a touchstone as powerful as the Vietnam War Memorial Wall in Washington DC where surviving veterans and the families and loved ones of veterans can begin to understand what happened there. VIETNAM: REFLEXES AND REFLECTIONS is at once a catalogue of the artists (some 95 men/women, US/Vietnamese ) represented in the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum in Chicago, IL; with the tender forward by Director Sondra Varco and insightful essays on art and war through history and art in the Vietnam setting, this book becomes the standard for scholarly studies about a particularly painful time and the body of art it produced. This book should be required reading for all Americans: the art contained in it touches us all.

This book is an extremely moving overview of the experiences of our nation's young men and women, who traveled half way around the world to fight in America's longest and most unpopular war.

For those interested in the NVVAM's artifact collection, check out Weapons and Field Gear of the NVA and VC and the forthcoming Viet Cong due to be released in January 1999.

Would you believe I got this book for just over a dollar brand new?

Well at that price I decided to take a chance on purchasing it and I am glad I did.

What an amazing book is all I can say.

Nearly very page is filled with stunning, shocking, haunting, humorous, reflective and horrific artwork, created by Vietnam Vets over the years and you are treated to a Table Top book with a difference.

In a nut shell this book, along with its down to earth narratives bites at your soul.

This is no Gung Ho patriotic war book about the glories of war; this book turns war on its head through sculpture, painting, photographs, poetry and pure raw self expression, Vietnam vets, both men and women able to tell their story, as they experienced it.

Nothing prepared me for what I was going to behold, not only visually but through the written word too.

This is one hell of a book that leaves you with a bitter sweet taste in your mouth that you will never, ever forget.

This is an absolutely incredible book that looks at what Vietnam really was through the eyes of others. I especially enjoyed John Plunkett's artwork, which is excellent. Highly recommened.

Visceral is the word that will carpet-bomb your mind, as you go through the pages in this book. The printed words between the covers become typographic decoration that serves only to remind you that this is a book and not an elevator ride into Dantes, raging inferno. Your eviscerated body will be dragged over hot mental glass, into the pain, anguish and combat dementure that gnaws at the souls of the men that lived through the nightmare known as Vietnam. There are no other books, there are no collections of words written anywhere that will affect your mind, body and souls, as much as this collection of art.

Truth. Those who served in Vietnam and saw and experienced the intensity and boredom, hate and love, fear, terror, and acceptance, have never seen or felt anything like that again. Those who would glorify their experience or this war will not get pleasure in this book. Those who would like to exorcise some long hidden demons or have long tried to explain to others what their experience was like may get something out of this. Its bluntness and truth are as the experience itself (without the sound of the helicopters or the brass tinkling to the ground)Be warned it is not always a good thing to uncover these images, if you have been successful at burying feelings and pains and want them to stay buried this book is not for you. I found it to be liberating to once again embrace the feelings the art in this book released and let some of them go I hope forever. The language of the stories by and about the artists brought as much to the surface as the art itself.