Summary and Reviews of They Marched Into Sunlight by David Maraniss

Media Reviews

The New York Times - Janet Maslin Are the battle and the antiwar melee profoundly linked because they occurred simultaneously? No...but what will now connect them forever is this book's inspired use of narrative cross-cutting to produce devastating culture shock. In adopting what is surely the most hackneyed and overused of storytelling techniques, too often a method of building fake suspense out of arbitrary connections, Mr. Maraniss succeeds in making adroit, wrenching juxtapositions.

The New York Times Book Review - Philip Caputo Moving between the campus at Madison and the jungles of Vietnam, with side trips to Hanoi and Washington, the tale unfolds with a magisterial sweep that recaptures the war and its era, filled with moral ambiguity and moral conviction, with promise and dread, with hippie antics and weekly body counts.

The Washington Post - David Halberstam At its best, They Marched Into Sunlight is wonderful reporting. The military part, the story of the 2/28 (second battalion of the 28th infantry regiment) Black Lions walking into the ambush that day, recalls some of the very best nonfiction writing of the war....He has added one more uncommonly readable book to what is already a rich literature of a difficult chapter in American life.

Kirkus Reviews A sprawling, vivid, and hard-to-put-down account of a mere two days in the fall of 1967, a time of two fierce battles one in South Vietnam, the other in Wisconsin.....Both battles wrought terrible scars that have still not healed, and Maraniss’s careful narrative shows just why that should be so. Extraordinary, and likely to become a standard in courses devoted to the history of the Vietnam War.

Library Journal - Karl Helicher This lengthy narrative keeps the reader engrossed throughout. Highly recommended for public libraries.

Booklist - Gilbert Taylor This is a concentrated, visceral remembrance of the Vietnam War in both its military and social dimensions.

Publishers Weekly The two narratives together provide a fierce, vivid diptych of America bisected by a tragic war a moving remembrance for those who lived through it and an illuminating lesson for a new generation trying to understand what it was all about.