Boots on the Ground: America's War in Vietnam

"It was longlisted for the National Book Award and was also a finalist for the YALSA [Young Adult Library Services Association] Excellence in Nonfiction Award, two of the most important distinctions for this category. It made quite an impression. Boots On The Ground is a chronological examination of the Vietnam War as it unfolded, and also framed by the story of how the Vietnam Memorial in Washington came about. It is a meditation on how a nation remembers war and why memory is so fraught. “It is a meditation on how a nation remembers war and why memory is so fraught” The special sauce here is a convention that many adult writers use. Partridge shows the war, as it happened, through the eyes of eight characters. These characters include soldiers on the ground, a nurse, a refugee, and political leaders. The core characters in the book are all still alive today. Partridge did a lot of original reporting to give her readers these varied perspectives. In my experience, among high school students, there’s a prevalent attitude of ‘why do we need to worry so much about the past?’ The fact that the characters in Partridge’s account are still walking around among us—and still grappling with the legacies of the Vietnam War—makes it easier for this history to penetrate for young people. Physically, this is a beautiful book. As someone in publishing, I can see how much work went into this. It’s a wide format. A lot of original archival photographs, pictures that were unfamiliar to me, are beautifully reprinted. The graphical elements of the book are gorgeous. It makes you want to pick it up and spend time with what’s inside. Crash is about the Great Depression. A big part of the New Deal was devoted to cultural programs, which collected an enormous quantity of visual material, from photographs to posters to other graphic artwork. These in a sense enabled the New Deal programs to record history as it happened, and to capture the experience of daily life in America during the Great Depression. In Crash , the photographs aren’t merely illustrating what I’m saying in the text; I use them to convey information that that stands on its own and goes beyond what I can describe in narrative terms. I think young adults have the experience and sophistication to “read” imagery in this way—to me, the challenge is in curating the material effectively for them, as you would for any audience."