Dispatches

The best book I have ever read on men and war in our time – John Le Carré, author of The Spy Who Came in From the ColdHaving read Dispatches, it is difficult to convey the impact of total experience as all the facades of patriotism, heroism and the whole colossal fraud of American intervention fall away to the bare bones of fear, war and death – William S. Burroughs, author of JunkySplendid … he brings alive the terror of combat in a way that rivals All Quiet on the Western Front – Tom Wolfe, author of The Lost BoyIn the great line of Crane, Orwell and Hemingway … he seems to have brought to this book the ear of a musician and the eye of a painter, Frank Zappa and Francis Bacon * The Washington Post *We have all spent ten years trying to explain what happened to our heads and our lives in the decade we finally survived - but Michael Herr’s Dispatches puts all the rest of us in the shade – Hunter S. Thompson, author of Fear and Loathing in Las VegasIf it were only unconventional journalism, it would stand with the best there is - but it’s a good deal more than that … I believe it may be the best personal journal about war, about any war, that any writer has ever accomplished – Robert Stone, author of Damascus Gate

Michael Herr was born in 1940 in Syracuse, New York. He was a writer and former war correspondent best known as the author of Dispatches (1977), a memoir of his time as a correspondent for Esquire magazine (1967-1969) during the Vietnam War. He died in 2016, aged seventy-six.