Course Description

Instructor: Dan Zins, PhD

Reading James Carroll’s heartbreaking memoir American Requiem (National Book Award winner) and Tim O’Brien’s equally moving short story ‘On the Rainy River,’ this course will offer an interdisciplinary critique of the Vietnam war, the antiwar movement, and the 2017 PBS documentary. With consummate artistry and empathy Carroll and O’Brien dramatize their increasing distress and doubts about the morality and necessity of the war, an anguish exacerbated by their families’ very different perspectives on Vietnam, U.S. foreign policy, “patriotism,� and the legitimacy of the domestic opposition. What lessons might that very polarized time be especially relevant in our own deeply divided era?