Dispatches

When Michael Herr died this week, this book, one of the few he wrote, understandably dominated his obituaries. Published in 1977, a decade after his year spent reporting in Vietnam—and after he weathered a post-war breakdown—Dispatches still carried an edgy, intense, immediacy that made it, and still makes it, one of the most essential American books on the conflict. It's a story that didn't sit well with him as he lived and wrote it, and it didn't sit well with him after, despite—or because of—its immediate acclaim. It still doesn't sit well, and that's part of its continuing power.