In Dispatches Michael Herr brings the reader right to the heart of the Vietnam War. These are his journals, written with such immediacy and sympathy, such an insightful understanding of the facades and falsities that surround him, that the reader is mesmerized. With Dispatches Michael Herr comes close to achieving the impossible: summing up the colossal waste and complexity of war, while keeping hold of the real people, places and events that comprise it.

`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