John Clark Pratt's Books

"Reading the Wind"

The Literature of the Vietnam War : an Interpretative Critique

By: Timothy J. Lomperis,John Clark Pratt

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"Reading the Wind"

The Literature of the Vietnam War : an Interpretative Critique

By: Timothy J. Lomperis,John Clark Pratt

The decade following the American defeat in Vietnam has been filled with doubts about American politics and values, confusion over the lessons of the war, and anger about the physical and psychological suffering that occurred during the war as well as thereafter. In the years since the U.S. withdrawal, our need to make sense of Vietnam has prompted an outpouring of thinking and writing, from scholarly reappraisals of American foreign policy to highly personal accounts of participants. On the tenth anniversary of the final U. S. withdrawal, the Asia Society sponsored a conference on the Vietnam experience in American literature at which leading writers, critics, publishers, commentators, and academics wrestled with this phenomenon. Drawing on the synergy of this conference, Timothy J. Lomperis has produced an original work that focuses on the growing body of literature—including novels, personal accounts, and oral histories—which describes the experiences of American soldiers in Vietnam as well as the experience of veterans upon their return home.

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Page Count

196

Publisher

Duke University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0822307499

ISBN 13

9780822307495

How to Revise a True War Story

Tim O'Brien's Process of Textual Production

By: John K. Young

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How to Revise a True War Story

Tim O'Brien's Process of Textual Production

By: John K. Young

“You can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it,” Tim O’Brien writes in The Things They Carried. Widely regarded as the most important novelist to come out of the American war in Viet Nam, O’Brien has kept on telling true war stories not only in narratives that cycle through multiple fictional and non-fictional versions of the war’s defining experiences, but also by rewriting those stories again and again. Key moments of revision extend from early drafts, to the initial appearance of selected chapters in magazines, across typescripts and page proofs for first editions, and through continuing post-publication variants in reprints. How to Revise a True War Story is the first book-length study of O’Brien’s archival papers at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center. Drawing on extensive study of drafts and other prepublication materials, as well as the multiple published versions of O’Brien’s works, John K. Young tells the untold stories behind the production of such key texts as Going After Cacciato, The Things They Carried, and In the Lake of the Woods. By reading not just the texts that have been published, but also the versions they could have been, Young demonstrates the important choices O’Brien and his editors have made about how to represent the traumas of the war in Viet Nam. The result is a series of texts that refuse to settle into a finished or stable form, just as the stories they present insist on being told and retold in new and changing ways. In their lack of textual stability, these variants across different versions enact for O’Brien’s readers the kinds of narrative volatility that is key to the American literature emerging from the war in Viet Nam. Perhaps in this case, you can tell a true war story if you just keep on revising it.

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Page Count

272

Publisher

University of Iowa Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1609384687

ISBN 13

9781609384685

The Deaths of Others

The Fate of Civilians in America's Wars

By: John Tirman

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The Deaths of Others

The Fate of Civilians in America's Wars

By: John Tirman

Americans are greatly concerned about the number of our troops killed in battle--33,000 in the Korean War; 58,000 in Vietnam; 4,500 in Iraq--and rightly so. But why are we so indifferent, often oblivious, to the far greater number of casualties suffered by those we fight and those we fight for? This is the compelling, largely unasked question John Tirman answers in The Deaths of Others. Between six and seven million people died in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq alone, the majority of them civilians. And yet Americans devote little attention to these deaths. Other countries, however, do pay attention, and Tirman argues that if we want to understand why there is so much anti-Americanism around the world, the first place to look is how we conduct war. We understandably strive to protect our own troops, but our rules of engagement with the enemy are another matter. From atomic weapons and carpet bombing in World War II to napalm and daisy cutters in Vietnam and beyond, our weapons have killed large numbers of civilians and enemy soldiers. Americans, however, are mostly ignorant of these methods, believing that American wars are essentially just, necessary, and "good." Trenchant and passionate, The Deaths of Others forces readers to consider the tragic consequences of American military action not just for Americans, but especially for those we fight against.

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Page Count

417

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0199700990

ISBN 13

9780199700998

Parallels

The Soldier's Knowledge and the Oral History of Contemporary Warfare

By: John T. Hansen,A. Susan Owen,Michael Patrick Madden

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Parallels

The Soldier's Knowledge and the Oral History of Contemporary Warfare

By: John T. Hansen,A. Susan Owen,Michael Patrick Madden

The experience of American and Soviet participants in Vietnam and Afghanistan respectively is constructed directly from the narratives and the recollection of surviving veterans. In their very intensity and authenticity, these voices pose a challenge to conventional understandings of contemporary warfare. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

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Page Count

268

Publisher

Transaction Publishers

ISBN 10

0202367738

ISBN 13

9780202367736

The Grapes of Wrath

Text and Criticism; Revised Edition

By: John Steinbeck

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The Grapes of Wrath

Text and Criticism; Revised Edition

By: John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression follows the western moevement of wone family and a nation in search of work and human dignity. This completely updated Viking Critical Library Edition of The Grapes of Wrath includes the full text of the novel, corrected in 1996, as well as extensive and contextual material including: Essays placing The Grapes of Wrath in social context, including a 1942 essay by Carey McWilliams about migrant workers and working conditions and a Martin Schockley piece on the reception of The Grapes of Wrath in Oklahoma Eight new essays by John Ditsky, Nellie Y. McKay, MimiReisel Gladstein, Louis Owens, and others An essay on the background to the composition of The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck's biographer, Jackson J. Benson An introduction by the editor, a chronology, a list of topics for discussion and papers, and a bibliography

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Page Count

737

Publisher

Penguin

Published Date

ISBN 10

0140247750

ISBN 13

9780140247756

Complete Poems

By: Edwin John Pratt

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Complete Poems

By: Edwin John Pratt

The volume offers a full sampling of Pratt's poems chosen both for their representativeness and for their intrinsic value.

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Page Count

984

Publisher

University of Toronto Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0802057756

ISBN 13

9780802057754

The Citizen Soldiers

The Plattsburg Training Camp Movement, 1913-1920

By: John Garry Clifford

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The Citizen Soldiers

The Plattsburg Training Camp Movement, 1913-1920

By: John Garry Clifford

The Citizen Soldiers explores the military reform movement that took its name from the famous Business Men's Military Training Camps at Plattsburg, New York. It also illuminates the story of two exceptional men: General Leonard Wood, the rambunctious and controversial former Rough Rider who galvanized the Plattsburg Idea with his magnetic personality; and Grenville Clark, a young Wall Street lawyer. The Plattsburg camps strove to advertise the lack of military preparation in the United States and stressed the military obligation every man owed to his country. Publicized by individuals who voluntarily underwent military training, the preparedness movement rapidly took shape in the years prior to America's entry into the First World War. Far from being war hawks, the Plattsburg men emphasized the need for a "citizen army" rather than a large professional establishment. Although they failed in their major objective—universal military training—their vision of a citizen army was largely realized in the National Defense Act of 1920, and their efforts helped to establish selective service as the United States' preferred recruitment method in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Featuring a new preface by the author, this new edition of a seminal study will hit shelves just in time for the World War I Centennial.

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Page Count

261

Publisher

University Press of Kentucky

Published Date

ISBN 10

081315443X

ISBN 13

9780813154435

America's First General Staff

A Short History of the Rise and Fall of the General Board of the U.S. Navy, 1900–1950

By: John Trost Kuehn

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America's First General Staff

A Short History of the Rise and Fall of the General Board of the U.S. Navy, 1900–1950

By: John Trost Kuehn

The General Board of the Navy, in existence from 1900 to 1950, was a uniquely American and unparalleled strategic planning organization. As John T. Kuehn shows, this was the United States' first modern general staff in peacetime, as well as the nexus for naval thought and strategic thinking. The Board's creation reflected the reformist spirit of the era that also gave birth to the Army War College, the Army General Staff, and the Chief of Naval Operations. As such, the General Board and its mission also reflected an attempt to reconcile the primacy of civilian control of the military with an increasing need for more formal military and naval planning establishments, processes, and methods. Thus the General Board's very name reflected the idea shared by both corporate America and naval tradition that challenges and problems could be met with special, temporary organizational bodies. By the 1920s the General Board had become a permanent feature of the Navy and was regarded as the premier strategic "think tank" for advice to the Secretary of the Navy. Evolving over the course of its existence, the Board developed into a bona fide institutional component atop the service's hierarchy. Kuehn highlights how this small body, wielding immense influence over the span of its organizational life, was an innovative, progressive, and productive force for the security of the United States in peace and for naval success in war. The service of the men comprising the Board is little known, but their collaborative ethos should serve as a model for their modern counterparts. Kuehn's organizational history of the General Board provides context on the complexities and turbulence involved in building the modern Navy that transitioned over time from coal and sail to nuclear-powered warships. America's First General Staff offers the first single-volume history of the General Board of the Navy, as well as an analysis of the U.S. Navy during periods of great change in both peace and war.

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Page Count

255

Publisher

Naval Institute Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1682471926

ISBN 13

9781682471920

Edgar Snow

A Biography

By: John Maxwell Hamilton

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Edgar Snow

A Biography

By: John Maxwell Hamilton

Edgar Snow (1905--1972) was one of the most notable Western journalists to report on China in both the revolutionary and postrevolutionary periods. He first became famous in the mid-1930s when he broke through a Nationalist blockade and reached the Communists in northwest China. For nearly a decade, no foreign reporter had seen the Communists, who were widely regarded as a ragtag bandit army. Snow took them seriously as a national movement. His reporting in the now-famous book Red Star over China was major news, even to the Chinese, thousands of whom joined the Communists after reading it. It has remained a seminal reference on the early Chinese Communist movement. In this award-winning biography, journalist John Maxwell Hamilton follows Snow from his birth in Kansas City to his rise as a celebrated foreign correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post, his ostracism during the cold war, and his role as a singular journalistic bridge between Communist China and the United States. With a new preface by the author, this revealing portrait of the widely misunderstood Snow firmly establishes him as a model for the kind of committed reporting that is crucial to understanding our interdependent world.

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Page Count

404

Publisher

LSU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807129127

ISBN 13

9780807129128

The Mercy Rule

A Novel

By: John Lescroart

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The Mercy Rule

A Novel

By: John Lescroart

“A stylish whodunit . . . Lescroart [is] in his best form yet.”—People Once Dismas Hardy was a cop. Now he spends his days in a lawyer’s suit, billing hours to a corporate client in a downtown San Francisco office. Hardy’s wife and kids like it that way. Then one client changes everything. Graham Russo, a former baseball star, is charged with murdering his dying father. Was it suicide, the last desperate act of a dying man? Was it murder? Or mercy? Now, as a carnival of reporters, activists, cops, lovers, and families throng around the case, Dismas Hardy is going to trial with a client he doesn’t trust, a key witness he cannot believe, and a system that almost destroyed him once. For Dismas, this case will challenge everything he believes about the law, about his family, and about himself. Because a chilling truth is beginning to emerge about an old man’s lonely death. And what Dismas knows could put him next in line to die. . . . Praise for The Mercy Rule “Very entertaining . . . a large and emotionally sprawling novel.”—Chicago Tribune “As usual in a Lescroart novel, character dominates plot as the author proves, yet again, that resonant drama can be found in family.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer “An edge-of-the-seat legal thriller that has it all—hot-button issues, deception, greed, corruption, and a labyrinthine plot that will keep you guessing until the very last page.”—Faye Kellerman

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Page Count

642

Publisher

Dell

Published Date

ISBN 10

0440222826

ISBN 13

9780440222828

Book's by John Clark Pratt

"Reading the Wind"

"Reading the Wind"

How to Revise a True War Story

How to Revise a True War Story

The Deaths of Others

The Deaths of Others

Parallels

Parallels

The Grapes of Wrath

The Grapes of Wrath

Complete Poems

Complete Poems

The Citizen Soldiers

The Citizen Soldiers

America's First General Staff

America's First General Staff

Edgar Snow

Edgar Snow

The Mercy Rule

The Mercy Rule

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