According to our local Sunday newspaper, which carries the USAToday top books for the week list, the number # 1 book this week is Kristin Hannah's The Women, which happens to be sitting here right in my room! I feel so "with it."
So this just had to be my blog this weekend for a couple reasons: 1) Yes, it really is terrific and I'd say deserves to be #1; 2) From 1964-75 I was quite oblivious of the Vietnam War as I was in high school, college, the novitiate and my first years teaching...all of those took all my time and interest---sad to say; 3) However, the stories and experiences portrayed in this excellent historical fiction novel were familiar to me from another angle: the TV show MASH set in the Korean War in the early 1950s. At least the major characters who are army surgical nurses/doctors and in war time were protrayed very much as Hawkeye and Hot Lips.
I'm just getting to the returning home part and I can tell that will be the really hard section as the anti-war attitudes in the USA were so strong and seemingly rampant throughout the country by that time. One major piece in the book that was totally new to me was the recurring statement by many characters that, "There were no women in Vietnam." This is startling to the army nurses, of course, but maybe it was a true PR stance of the military then???
Anyway, the book is great and, if by any chance you missed a lot of this war, too, you might learn a lot that never sifted down before your news program viewing days or the openness of journalism that exists now....we hope.
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