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Powell's Staff:
Five Book Friday: In Memoriam
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Every year, the booksellers at Powell’s submit their Top Fives: their five favorite books that were released in 2023. It’s a list that, when put together, shows just how varied and interesting the book tastes of Powell’s booksellers are. I highly recommend digging into the recommendations — we would never lead you astray — but today...
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Brontez Purnell:
Powell’s Q&A: Brontez Purnell, author of ‘Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt’
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Rachael P.:
Starter Pack: Where to Begin with Ursula K. Le Guin
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Customer Comments
Stanton Coerr has commented on (2) products
Boyd The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War
by
Robert Coram
Stanton Coerr
, June 22, 2009
This book is brilliant: insightful, disturbing and thought-provoking. Coram does an excellent job describing the way in which this intense, obsessive Air Force Colonel changed the way the U.S. military thinks about war. Boyd gave up on everything - his service, his wife, his children, his career - for the sake of the greater good he created with his theories on warfighting. He was obsessed with energy: how to build it, how to shed it, and how to make that transition more quickly. These ideas led to maneuver warfare, which in turn led to the Marine Corps and Army destroying the Iraqi Army twice in twelve years. The book makes you angry, makes you nervous, and makes you think. Truly superb.
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Sense of Duty My Father My American Journey
by
Quang X Pham
Stanton Coerr
, June 22, 2009
The cover of Quang Pham's book says it all. Beneath the title, "A Sense Of Duty," and the subtitle, "My Father, My American Journey" are a photograph of the younger Quang Pham, Captain USMC, in his flight suit. He stands with his father, who is dressed in a suit. In the background is a map of Vietnam, fading into a blur, the backdrop but not the focus for the story. When Quang finished his book last year and the publisher sent him a sample of the cover scheme, he was initially pleased with the layout...until he realized that they had simply taken a current map of Vietnam, with Ho Chi Minh City prominent, instead of the map of the Vietnam and the Saigon for which so many Vietnamese and Americans fought and died. A typically American mistake, illustrative of our attitude toward that country and its people. This is a story of father and son, of war and life and family and loss, and it provides a perspective on the war which we as Marines rarely see. The Vietnam War did not end in 1975, though Americans think it did. The photographs of the American Embassy's evacuation are seared into our consciousness as the last chapter in a ten-part book begun in 1964, but for the Vietnamese the war did not begin with us, nor did it end when our involvement did. Quang Pham was born in Saigon in 1964, "six months before President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered thousands of U.S. Marines into my country," and fled with his mother and sisters to the United States in 1975. His father, Pham Van Hoa, was a tough, aggressive Skyraider attack pilot for the VNAF, one of the brave men who fought tenaciously to unite a Vietnam they knew lay somewhere beneath politics and war. Hoa was shot down in April 1964, rescued by a Marine helicopter pilot and returned to duty in the sky. It was his close friendship with American aviators with whom he trained and fought that allowed him to get his family out of the country when the South Vietnamese center lost its hold. Quang's journey sounds like a running travelogue of the American experience in that ruined country. Along the way were normal, happy boyhood memories, but with a twist. Quang loved to fish, especially with his father...but they fished in bomb craters left from American Arclight strikes. He excelled in his French classes in Saigon and used to look out his classroom window at the Presidential Palace...and then, one day, the bombs began to fall and children cowered beneath their desks. He played on his clean, suburban style street in officer's housing...across the street from the house of former Prime Minister Ky. A happy childhood in Saigon gives way to a happy life at Tan Son Nhut, thence downward to the depths of war and a midnight flight out of the country crammed into a U.S. Air Force C-130. Followed then time in the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii, a temporary home in (of all places) Fort Chafee, Arkansas, and an eventual home at Port Hueneme, in Oxnard, California. Quang, his mother and sisters were safe and cared for, a very lucky one percent of Vietnamese families who made it out intact. Meanwhile, Hoa, who had stayed behind in an effort to bring a recalcitrant mother along in the exodus, watched in horror as friends changed allegiance and his country fell apart. His wife and children were gone, and he no longer had a job, a service or a country. The North Vietnamese scooped him up, and sentenced him to 12 years of reeducation. Lost in the camps, Hoa vanished. Not until 1984 did the family discover, thanks to a hand-drawn portrait of him, that Hoa, now in his "third term" of reeducation, was alive. Ironically, Quang saw the portrait just weeks after he had raised his hand, renounced his homeland and sworn allegiance as a brand new citizen of the United States. He returned to his undergraduate studies at UCLA, and waited. Quang made it into the Marine Corps, and became the first Vietnamese Marine Corps aviator. He intended to become a helicopter pilot, and did; the bravery of then-Marine Major John Braddon, the H-34 pilot who had rescued his father from an LZ at Do Xa in 1964, pulled at Quang, and the decision made itself. He flew the venerable CH-46, climbing the ladder from squadron nugget to signer to section leader. He flew in Desert Storm, and served honorably and well, but the memories of his father, fading, ate at him. Then, at last, came the word: Hoa Pham has been released and the Vietnamese government is allowing him to emigrate to the United States. Quang was preparing to deploy aboard USS Tarawa for a MEU rotation, and, not wanting to be thought a non-hacker, kept quiet about his father's return to his family. Quang's CO found out about Hoa, and allowed Quang to remain behind an extra week and meet the ship in Hawaii. And so, at the gate at LAX, a stooped, thin and graying man walked off a plane, and after 17 years the Pham family was reunited. Here a normal book, with stock characters, would end happily. The Pham family's fate, however, followed the unfortunate arc of the American involvement with that country and in that war. High-spirited and well-intentioned hopes for the future met cold reality over the years, and as we left that country in ruins so did the separation of Hoa and his wife prove a burden too great to bear. Hoa left the family, this time by choice, unable to reconnect. And Quang, the "half-orphan" from Vietnam, drew the circle full. He resigned his commission after seven years of service, and the day after he was officially discharged from active Marine Corps service, in April 1995, he landed in Saigon to begin his reconciliation with his homeland. He is bemused by the Vietnamese insistence on trying to speak English in deference to him, a Vietnamese man (or is he Japanese? Or Chinese?) so obviously American. In the sharpest of ironies, a "tattered little boy," capitalist to the core, hawked copies of The Quiet American on the Saigon street as Quang and his friends walked along. Quang bought one, tacit admission of his "luck and fate twenty years earlier," without which he, too, would have been a scruffy urchin hustling for his family. Quang Pham took a leave of absence from his job to write this book, angry at the fact that of the more than 3500 books written in English about the Vietnam War, very few have thought about how the Vietnamese viewed the conflict. Instead of a diatribe against the America which sold out his country and abandoned his father, he focuses on the wide-open America of opportunity and kindness. American families took in his Vietnamese family, provided for them in their earliest and most desperate days. Quang Pham is a product of Saigon and southern California equally; he is Vietnamese and American. Both countries are important, both resonate in him...and, now, in us.
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