Jan Barry
"War and Literature"The Madness of It All: Essays on War, Literature and American Life By W.D. Ehrhart McFarland & Co., 273 pp., 2002 Reviewed by Jan Barry If American literature were acclaimed by talent rather than by the size of advertising accounts, a new book by W.D. Ehrhart would be the talk of the arts and culture world. One of the poet laureates of the Vietnam War, Ehrhart’s memoirs, to many readers, are even more sizzling. But there is scant mention in the mass media of his latest work. Outside Philadelphia, where he lives and occasionally is showcased in The Inquirer, Ehrhart is a hard sell in establishment newsrooms. A major reason, I suspect, is his blistering critique of press coverage of Vietnam and subsequent US military adventures—the topic of the title essay in The Madness of It All. Another reason, certainly, is that his publisher is a small press with a minuscule promotion budget. Getting minimal media attention, in any case, has been one of Bill Ehrhart’s frustrations ever since his first poems appeared in 1972 in a slim anthology of poetry by Vietnam veterans published from my kitchen table... (from the review in The Virginia Quarterly Review) |
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