This Is a True War Story: My Improbable History with Vietnam - Hardcover

$27.50

This Is a True War Story: My Improbable History with Vietnam - Hardcover

Name: This Is a True War Story: My Improbable History with Vietnam - Hardcover
Brand: BooksCloud
SKU: 9780226846880
Price: 27.50 USD
Availability: InStock

by Robert K. Brigham

$27.50

Book Overview

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by Robert K. Brigham (Author)

A personal account by a war historian and adoptee who discovers his biological father was a famous Marine combat photographer in Vietnam.

Robert K. Brigham has had a substantial career as a historian of the Vietnam War, with a hand in nine books, a documentary, public history projects, and more. While many a historian has felt compelled at some point to write about a subject close to them personally, Brigham did not think he was doing that. But, at age fifty-eight, Brigham, who had long known he was adopted, discovered that he'd improbably and unknowingly been studying and talking about his biological father for decades. That man, Bruce Atwell, was a Marine Corps photographer who took some of that war's most indelible and widely reproduced pictures. Brigham had used those images over and over again in decades' worth of classes and public lectures, never knowing the truth.

Both Brigham and Atwell were products of the American foster care and adoption system, and both were defined professionally by Vietnam. In a story shot through with echoes and shadows, Brigham not only reveals his own history as an adoptee but opens a startlingly fresh vantage on the fragility of American families; the power of social norms and taboos to shape lives; and the forces that inequitably disrupt families, not least of them war. The result is an accessible and moving book that is at once both a powerful personal story and an illuminating social critique.

Author Biography

Robert K. Brigham is the Shirley Ecker Boskey Professor of History and International Relations at Vassar College. He is the author or coauthor of ten books, among them Reckless: Henry Kissingerand the Tragedy of Vietnam.

Number of Pages: 264

Dimensions: 0.8 x 9.1 x 6.2 IN

Publication Date: May 05, 2026

ISBN	9780226846880
Author	Robert K. Brigham
Publisher	University of Chicago Press
Genre	Biography and History
Format	Hardcover
Published	May 2026
Language	ENG- English
Pages	264
Weight	1.0 lb
Target Audience	Adults
Print Size	Standard Print