From the first review to the most recent assessment, critics have lavished praise on Dispatches (1977), Michael Herr's book about the Vietnam War. Major literary scholars of that war are unanimous in their judgments that this "rock 'n' roll' work of literary journalism is perhaps the single most powerful book to come out of that war, and the book is almost universally considered a landmark. Dust jacket blurbs rarely reflect a scholarly consensus, but they do in the case of Dispatches. Gloria Emerson claimed that Herr surpassed Stephen Crane in writing about war. Tom Wolfe still maintains that Dispatches rivals Erich Maria Remarque's 1929 masterpiece, All Quiet on the Western Front. Hunter S. Thompson says that Herr's book "puts all the rest of us in the shade." Robert Stone says, "I believe it may be the best personal journal about war, any war, that any writer has ever accomplished." Finally...