Preview of A Boat to Nowhere Summary:

This is not overtly or particularly a story about the Vietnam War. It is, rather, about the effects of any war on the quality of individual lives—the dislocations, emotional terrors, and physical sufferings that national conflicts bring to the lives of all citizens.

Wartski personally experienced the American-Japanese war, and she lived in southeast Asia just as the American Vietnamese War was building. In her Vietnam visits during this time, she saw the devastation already apparent after the earlier, ten-year French-Vietnam war that had ostensibly ended in 1954 with the Geneva Accords but never in fact resolved any of the issues that fed that anticolonial conflict. Thus, her empathy with and continuing interest in what happened in Southeast Asia—as well as her own ethnicity—fueled this story about Vietnamese boat people. Even though the experiences are not directly hers, the book rings true because...