Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character - Hardcover

Shay, Jonathan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0689121822 ISBN 13: 9780689121821

Publisher: Atheneum, 1994

Synopsis

Compares the experiences of soldiers in the Vietnam war with those in the Trojan War, and examines how the stresses of combat affect the individual soldier

About this title

Review:

Shay works from an intriguing premise: that the study of the great Homeric epic of war, The Iliad, can illuminate our understanding of Vietnam, and vice versa. Along the way, he compares the battlefield experiences of men like Agamemnon and Patroclus with those of frontline grunts, analyzes the berserker rage that overcame Achilles and so many American soldiers alike, and considers the ways in which societies ancient and modern have accounted for and dealt with post-traumatic stress disorder---a malady only recently recognized in the medical literature, but well attested in Homer's pages. The novelist Tim O'Brien, who has written so affectingly about his experiences in combat, calls Shay's book "one of the most original and most important scholarly works to have emerged from the Vietnam war." He's right.

About the Author:

Jonathan Shay is a Boston-area psychiatrist whose patients are Vietnam combat veterans with severe, chronic post-traumatic stress disorder in the Department of Veterans Affairs Outpatient Clinic. He is also on the faculty of Tufts Medical School. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

About this edition

• Publisher: Atheneum
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0689121822
• ISBN 13: 9780689121821
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 246