Tobias Wolff's memoir of his childhood in the late 1950s in Chinook, Washington, with his mother and her brutal second husband Dwight. He lies compulsively, reinvents himself repeatedly, and eventually escapes to a Connecticut boarding school on fraudulently obtained recommendations. One of the great American coming-of-age memoirs — about the self as a thing to be constructed rather than discovered.
Wolff's memoir of his year in Vietnam as an Army Special Forces advisor — stationed in a provincial town, teaching Vietnamese soldiers, trying not to die. Written with the precision and moral seriousness of his fiction, it is among the best literary memoirs of the Vietnam War.
