Black Virgin Mountain: A Return To Vietnam - Rilegato

Advance Praise for Black Virgin Mountain

“Black Virgin Mountain is a brilliant, masterful piece of writing. The book is loving, smart, angry, tender, blunt, heartbreaking, tough, edgy, funny, bitter, redemptive, and so incredibly well written—so passionate, so truly inspired—that I wanted to buy time on the Fox network and read the whole thing aloud. Black Virgin Mountain, I promise, will endure.”
—Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried

“It took bravery for me to read Black Virgin Mountain. The reader faces the reality of modern warfare. Larry Heinemann tells the truth about what we did in Vietnam and the consequences to the Vietnamese and to ourselves. He exults in describing how things work. In electrifying language, he communicates the exhilaration, unique to the once-combat soldier, of simply being, still, alive.”
—Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior and The Fifth Book of Peace

“No American novelist has written about the profound issues of military combat better than Larry Heinemann. Now he has written—in that ravishingly dynamic narrative voice that is distinctly his own—the finest memoir to come from the Vietnam War. But Larry Heinemann is neither a great ‘war novelist’ nor a great ‘Vietnam writer.’ He is a great writer and a great artist, period.”——Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

“Woven throughout Heinemann's blunt war commentary is an intimate and startling portrait of the Vietnam he has come to love. This is a book that I will read again.”
—Bob Kerrey, President, New School University

“Black Virgin Mountain is a wonderful book—so serious, so moving, so funny, so informational. It is history—we have been reading it aloud.”
—Grace Paley

“The veterans of Vietnam are still coming home, all these decades later, and Larry Heinemann’s long journey back to the mountain of his war, Nui Ba Den, is one of the simplest, truest, and most moving trips home that I’ve ever read.”
—David Maraniss, author of They Marched Into Sunlight

Larry Heinemann is the author of three novels: Close Quarters (1977), one of the earliest novels of the Vietnam War; Paco's Story (1987), winner of the National Book Award; and Cooler by the Lake (1992).  He lives in his native city of Chicago, Illinois.