Books like Bloods — picked by fans

I am recommending this book as it is a true story about the initial engagement of US conventional Army forces in a major battle in the Vietnam War. It set the stage for how all future battles in that environment would be conducted. The actions by both the US Army and the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) were followed throughout the war for the next eight years.

I particularly like the book because both authors participated in the battle, and their participation made for a very accurate retelling of the events. I found exceptional examples of leadership in this book, which I employed during the course of my twenty-five years of active duty as an Army officer and a helicopter pilot.

I also liked the fact that the book does not label the PAVN as the bad guys but just others fighting for what they believed in. 

This is the book that made me want to be a novelist. I stole it off my dad’s shelf when I was 11—way too young to be reading about the seedy, violent, sex-fueled underbelly of 1970s counterculture. It’s the story of the an American journalist covering the war in Vietnam who gets the bright idea to smuggle heroin to California. I read it at least once a year, and it gets better every time.

Near the end of the book, an ex-Marine named Ray Hicks flees into the desert with the heroin on his back, gut-shot and bleeding out. The scene, masterfully intercut with hallucinations and memories from Hicks’s childhood, was clearly the inspiration for Frank Semyon’s death in Season Two of True Detective. My advice? Read this book instead. 

The original Vietnamese title of this novel was The Fate of Love. The hero is a veteran of the North Vietnamese Army who fought in The War Against the Americans to Save the Nation. He suffers from PTSD and mourns the loss of his fiancee. The novel proceeds as a series of discontinuous episodes as the hero relives traumatic memories.

Vietnam was a war complicated by political lies, class antagonism, and generational trauma.

The author seamlessly blends non-fiction with fiction, creating verisimilitude which references memoir without always being bound by the weight of facts, freeing the narrative. The horrors and hollowness of war are recounted through intimate encounters, unrequited loves, and imagined lives. In doing so, he keeps alive the friends and lovers who have died.

I found a catharsis in the clarity and coolness of his internal voice, which needs no embellishment to deliver its emotional blow. In writing about the everyday violence both during and after the conflict, he reminds us of the importance of love and morality.

In this brilliantly written novel, the unnamed narrator embodies the divisiveness that war causes in individuals and their families, with loyalty to one side conflicting with affection for the enemy.

The novel is based on a real-life double agent who fed accurate (but incomplete) information to American journalists and more complete information to the National Liberation Front. After the war, he was sidelined for being too friendly to Americans.

A perfect example of what a well-researched and written academic book on the Vietnam War should be.  Abandoning Vietnam tells the critical story of the military side of how America exited its conflict in Vietnam. In most western books on the Vietnam War, our allies in Vietnam, the South Vietnamese, are missing. But this book makes clear South Vietnam’s manifold strengths and clear weaknesses and why our alliance with them failed. The failure of that alliance not only cost more than 50,000 American lives but cost the Vietnamese millions and cost South Vietnam its very life. 

We like to forget what happened there in the wake of our defeat, but this book won’t let you forget. Reading this pushed me to write my own book to further the story.

This book is the embodiment of great storytelling. Guy Johnson takes us on a journey that is profound and addicting.

The characters are beautifully constructed against a backdrop of historical fiction, adventure, and romance. They are flawed, and you find yourself rooting for them at every turn. This is the first book I read that taught me how to better push the constraints of my own writing and to simply write what might feel personal but is also necessary.

Johnson was also the first author I ever reached out to, to say how much the book meant to me and he responded with the most engaging words of encouragement and advice for my own stories.

I’d highly recommend this book for anyone looking to escape in the pages of an epic tale that reads as if it is on the big screen. It’s masterfully written and makes for a soul-searing… show more.

Torchbearers is a pathbreaking history of the fight for American democracy during World War I, told from the perspective of African American servicemen who joined, fought, and returned from battle. Already engaged in conflict over civil rights in the US, African Americans took seriously the call to “make the world safe for democracy.” Through writing, activism, and organizing, they linked their domestic fight to the foreign fight against democracy’s enemies. Perhaps no other group in the US, Williams shows, was poised to engage the very biggest questions that animated the war – questions of citizenship, rights, freedom, and empire – as were African Americans. And their wartime service, he shows, was the crucible for the long freedom movement that followed.  

This book is a quiet and moving book about the loss of a father, which is also a lovely ode to nature.

It feels even more special knowing that Brian Pinkney finished the final art of this book after his father, Jerry, passed away, mirroring the boy in the story whose father leaves behind a final page in his sketchbook for him to finish. 

What a gift of a book.

This book is a foundational text in Black women’s studies and includes the statement by the Black lesbian feminist Combahee River Collective, which just celebrated 50 years. In the statement, they write, "We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women's lives as are the politics of class and race."

I appreciate the book because it shows the rich history of Black women’s writing and movement building, including the important role of Black lesbian feminist sisterhood. It was so exciting to read the letter written by Lorraine Hansberry to the lesbian periodical The Ladder in 1957, in which she links homophobia to the sexual oppression experienced by all women. I can’t help but scribble in the margins: see, lesbians have always been here! 

Although queer organizing is so often presented as something that is new or emerging, this book challenges… show more.