Word: sorrowed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...almost everyone else. Nineteen years after the fall of Saigon, it is not easy to persuade readers anywhere in the world to revisit the Vietnam War. That was the problem British literary agent Gill Coleridge faced when she tried to sell the rights to Ninh's Sorrow of War to American publishers in & 1992. "They all turned it down," says Coleridge. "I remember one said, 'We don't want to be told how badly we behaved in Vietnam...
...they wish they had not been so hasty. Since it first appeared in English last January, Ninh's book has gained a cult following in Europe and Asia. It has been reprinted six times in Britain, where in May it received the daily Independent's 1994 foreign-fiction award. Sorrow of War appeared on the shelves in Sweden in April. It will go on sale in France, Norway and Italy later this year and in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and the U.S. next year. The English version is already available across Asia but is hard to find. Ninh...
Much like Sorrow's central character, Kien, Ninh put his thoughts and experiences on paper long after the war's end. Though the author says his tale "is pure fiction," there are other similarities. Both writer and character are decorated soldiers in the NVA's 27th Youth Brigade. Each is among the unit's 500 conscripts who enter the war in the bloody Central Highlands -- and one of only nine survivors by the time the unit becomes the first to march into Saigon in 1975. After he was demobilized in 1976, Ninh tried university for a while and then quit...
...plight would deprive Congress of a rare power broker who helped push through the 1986 tax-reform bill and NAFTA. "No capital ever has a surplus of politicians with those qualities," the columnist David Broder lamented last week in the Washington Post. "Seeing him brought down . . . is a citywide sorrow...
What really distinguishes these pieces is their sorrow -- particularly for the plight of American blacks and society's losers. Kempton measures leaders by their capacity for compassion, summing up the greatness of Martin Luther King Jr. with this pronouncement: "A great man is one who knows that he was not put on earth to be part of a process through which a child can be hurt." His eye for the telling detail is never more acute than when rendering a scene of loss. Here he is describing Jacqueline Kennedy and her family entering St. Matthew's Cathedral at J.F.K...