10,000 Days of Thunder: A History of the Vietnam War

by Philip Caputo

Book Overview

It was the war that lasted ten thousand days. The war that inspired scores of songs. The war that sparked dozens of riots. And in this stirring chronicle, Pulitzer Prize- winning journalist Philip Caputo writes about our country's most controversial war -- the Vietnam War -- for young readers. From the first stirrings of unrest in Vietnam under French colonial rule, to American intervention, to the battle at Hamburger Hill, to the Tet Offensive, to...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0689862318
• ISBN13: 9780689862311
• Release Date: October 2005
• Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 1.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 10.2" x 10.1"
• Age Range: 9 to 12 years
• Grade Range: Grades 4 to 7

Customer Reviews

great book

I bought this book for my husband , he spent 2 tours in Vietnam liked the book

EXCELLENT WORK - WELL PRESENTED

This work is a quick view of the Vietnam War. The photography is excellent and the author has done an great job explaining several different aspects of this particular war. Our children (in my case grandchildren) need to know of this conflict and what this country went through during those times. War is bad and our children should know this. Each generation seems to have it's own war and perhaps if we start teaching our children early enough, they may, lets hope, be able to avoid thier own someday in the future. Having been in this particular one, I did feel the author treated the material rather well, and tried, with the limited space here, to give a fare account of what happend, when it happened, and why. Recommend this one highly.

In short, everything a young researcher needs to know about the war

Kids in grades 5-7 will find 10,000 Days Of Thunder to be a readily accessible survey of the Vietnam War which explores a war which lasted ten thousand days, sparking riots and controversy across America. Here are anecdotes from soldier and civilians, profiles of the actions of leaders, antiwar movements, and sidebars of quick facts paired with full-page maps, black and white and some color photos, and a dynamic coverage of key campaigns and battles: in short, everything a young researcher needs to know about the war.

Richie's Picks: 10,000 DAYS OF THUNDER

"Last electric Sunday morning, Waiting in the Park for the dawn." --Paul Kantner (1970) I arrived at the Park a little while past dawn on Sunday, greeted by vendors who were still setting up, and long lines of blue Porta-Potties that were standing shoulder to shoulder at attention. The morning prayer ritual was just about to commence. Mayor Gavin Newsom had declared it "Chet Helms Day." We streamed into Speedway Meadows by the thousands to spend the day ingesting sights, smells, and musical sets provided by scores of aging musicians who'd played at Helms' Avalon Ballroom back in the Sixties. For me, having been slightly too young and on the wrong coast to have experienced those days first-hand, having snuck into a Long Island drive-in theater in high school (None of us had a car!) to see many of these same musicians (and some of the same audience members) captured in the Woodstock and Fillmore: The Last Days movies, Sunday served as community get-together, musical history lesson, dream fulfillment experience, and peace rally. "Give me an F!" "F!" "Give me a U!" "U!" "Give me a C!" "C!" "Give me an K!" "K!" "What's that spell?" "What's that spell?" "What's that spell?" "What's that spell?" --Country Joe McDonald leading "The Fish Cheer," 10/30/2005 On the long crack-of-dawn bus ride down to San Franciso Sunday morning, I experienced Philip Caputo's 10,000 DAYS OF THUNDER: A HISTORY OF THE VIETNAM WAR, a powerful record of the sights and significance of those days. As with the San Francisco music scene of the Sixties, I was just a couple of years too young to have needed to make any life-altering decisions regarding The Draft. But just as surely as I grew up listening to that music on the radio and seeing those movies at the drive-in and my first Dead show at the Nassau Coliseum, I also grew up experiencing the War. But suddenly that War is so far in the past. "Every year they say we're going to get right up to the present, but we always get stuck in the Industrial Revolution. We got to World War I in seventh grade--who knew there had been a war with the whole world." --main character Melinda Sordino in Laurie Halse Anderson's, SPEAK 10,000 DAYS OF THUNDER is an incredibly timely book for adolescents who could well be looking war in the face in a few years. As a tenth-grade World History student standing in protest on the Capitol steps, listening to Phil Ochs and Coretta Scott King, I looked back at World War II which had ended a quarter-century earlier as if it were ancient history. For today's tenth-grade World History students, as the 2,000th American soldier falls in Iraq and Scooter Libby gets indicted as part of a tangled web of lies about the current War, the fall of Saigon is even further back into the past for them than Hiroshima was for me. "The Vietnam War has three dubious distinctions: It was the longest and the most unpopular war in American history and the only war America ever lost." Is it possible for a book about