"Down the Memory Hole: The Disappearance of the Recent Past" examines how textbooks deal with times people still alive remember. Many African societies divide humans into three categories: those alive, the "sasha" (recently-departed, living-dead), and the "zamani" (the dead). When reading about "sasha" events, Americans judge how the authors have gotten it right or wrong based on their own experience. For the distant past, they necessarily read less critically.
The Vietnam war is a topic I am very interested in but I have little knowledge about it. I learned a small bit about it in high school but it was just a brief overview of the war. None of the mass killings talked about in this chapter were taught in my textbooks. The war was just a side
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Chong (The Concubine's Children) presents the story of Phuc's miraculous recovery and the memorable life of the war victim always to be remembered as "the girl in the picture." Phuc's spent 13 months recovering from third-degree burns that covered 35 percent of her body. She later became a good student, but her dream of becoming a doctor was never realized because of the celebrity status given to her by the victorious Communists. Prime Minister Dong treated Phuc like a granddaughter, allowing her to attend the University of Havana in Cuba, far away from the demands of the Vietnamese government.
In conclusion, Much information presented in this chapter was about the Vietnam War, but I never got the idea of how the war happened. To help me understand about the war, I tried to research but couldn’t find anymore on the topic than what I already had. I got as far as North Vietnam was owned by French and Japanese, but still don't know how the war happened. I wish some site would give me the information on how it happened in a simple article. May be a more thorough understanding of the Cold War-era history is needed to