Five best memoirs

Gail Caldwell is the author of Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship. The former chief book critic of the Boston Globe, she was in 2001 awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism.

For the Wall Street Journal, she named a five best list of memoirs. One book on the list:

Dispatches
by Michael Herr (1977)

Every war has its Stephen Crane, its Robert Graves—and Vietnam had Michael Herr. He spent a year in-country in 1967, then nearly a decade turning what he saw there into a surreal narrative of the war's geography, from its napalmed landscape to the craters of a soldier's mind. Soldiers talked to Herr—told him things they hadn't said before or maybe even known. "I should have had 'Born to Listen' written on my helmet," he told me in London in 1988. What Herr dared to write about was war's primal allure: "the death space and the life you found inside it." That he created this gunmetal narrative with a blend of fact and creative memory was acknowledged from the first; his netherland of "truth" mirrored the dream-like quality of the war and influenced its literature for a decade to come.

Read about the other memoirs on the list.

Dispatches appears on Judith Paterson's list of the 10 best books of social concern by journalists.

--Marshal Zeringue