The Critics: Tom Bissell’s ‘The Father of All Things’

Travel Blog  •  Jim Benning  •  03.05.07 | 1:58 PM ET

imageNew York Times and Los Angeles Times critics raved Sunday about Tom Bissell’s new book, The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam. The book explores the journey Bissell took to Vietnam with his father, John, a veteran of the war. (Bissell initially wrote about the trip for Harper’s.) Bissell’s book, its publisher notes, “is the first major book about the war by an author who grew up after the fall of Saigon.” The war has had profound effect on his generation, and particularly, Bissell writes, on the sons and daughters of veterans: “At every meal Vietnam sat down, invisibly, with our families.”

In the New York Times, Joe Klein wrote that Bissell “brings a luminous prose style and, perhaps more important, a clear, fresh eye to events that many of us have allowed to slip into the infuriatingly painful past.”

Los Angeles Times reviewer Paul McLeary wasn’t always impressed by Bissell’s writing about the war. “As a travel writer, however, Tom Bissell is superb,” he wrote. “His descriptions of today’s Vietnam are breathtaking and deep, written with a novelist’s flair for giving life to the inanimate and the obscure.”

We’d have to agree with that observation about Bissell’s travel writing chops. Bissell is a contributor to World Hum. His essay Truth in Oxiana explores the notion of truth in travel literature. War Zones for Idiots focuses on Bissell’s trip to Afghanistan to cover the war.

Tags: Asia, Vietnam


1 Comment for The Critics: Tom Bissell’s ‘The Father of All Things’

Ben 03.06.07 | 2:52 PM ET

Nice post, Jim. Just thought I’d mention that EW called Bissel “a terrific writer with an eccentric vocabulary and a dark wit,” and out of the 6 nonfiction books reviewed in the current, March 5 issue of New York magazine, his is the only title they suggest buying immediately!

Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.