"The Lotus Eaters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Soli Tatjana)

Author’s Notes

This is a work of imagination, inspired by real people and events, but I’ve given myself the fiction writer’s prerogative of blending and mixing, outright distorting and making up. I have been an eager reader of every book and movie on Vietnam I’ve come across since I can remember, so influences are many and impossible to pinpoint. I first became aware of female journalists and photographers in Vietnam when I read about Dickey Chapelle in Horst Faas and Tim Page’s Requiem. In the course of my research, I found a few others who spent significant time there, among them Katherine Leroy, Kate Webb, and one photographer I only came across in preparation for publication, Barbara Gluck.

In the strange way of fiction, I had been writing the novel for several years, having one of the characters developing into a spy, before I read about the true case of Pham Xuan An, a North Vietnamese intelligence agent who also was working undercover as a journalist for Time magazine. That much information was validation, the rest imagination.

When this particular story began to come together, the following is a list of works I read and consulted, instrumental not only for facts but for immersion in the atmosphere of that time and place. It also might make a good reading list for those unfamiliar with the history of the country or the war. If I have forgotten or left off anything, I apologize, and any omission will be added in the future if pointed out.

Specifically for the Fall of Saigon, I’m indebted to:

Butler, David. The Fall of Saigon. New York: Simon amp; Schuster, 1985.

Dawson, Alan. 55 Days: The Fall of South Vietnam. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1977.