Vassar Club of New York Author Talk with Professor Robert Brigham

The event address will be provided to registrants.

Event Details

Please join us for a very special and personal Vassar Club of New York Author Talk in-person on Tuesday, July 21, at 6:30 p.m. ET, when we will welcome Professor Robert Brigham and discuss his latest book, This Is A True War Story.  Lynn Janovsky ’86 will lead the discussion. 

The event will be graciously hosted at the Upper West Side apartment of Jon Friedland ’90.

This Is A True War Story is a personal account by a war historian and adoptee who discovers his biological father was a famous Marine combat photographer in Vietnam. Bring a copy of your book for a post-discussion book signing (ordering links and discount code below)!

Robert K. Brigham has had a substantial career as a historian of the Vietnam War, with a hand in nine books, a documentary, public history projects, and more. While many a historian has felt compelled at some point to write about a subject close to them personally, Brigham did not think he was doing that. But, at age fifty-eight, Brigham, who had long known he was adopted, discovered that he’d improbably and unknowingly been studying and talking about his biological father for decades. That man, Bruce Atwell, was a Marine Corps photographer who took some of that war’s most indelible and widely reproduced pictures. Brigham had used those images over and over again in decades’ worth of classes and public lectures, never knowing the truth. (Author Photo Credit: Monica Church 2023)

Register for the author talk by July 14.

This Is A True War Story is available at your local bookstore, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Bookshop.org, and through the UChicago Press (enter code UCPNEW at checkout for 30% off).

Robert. K. Brigham, Shirley Ecker Boskey Professor of History and International Relations, joined the Vassar faculty in 1994. He is a specialist on the history of U.S. foreign policy, particularly the Vietnam War. Brigham is author or co-author of ten books, among them Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam (PublicAffairs, 2018); Is Iraq Another Vietnam? (PublicAffairs, 2006); and Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy (PublicAffairs, 1999), written with former secretary of defense, Robert S. McNamara and James G. Blight. Brigham’s latest book is This is a True War Story: My Improbable History with Vietnam (The University of Chicago Press, 2026).

Email the club at info@vassarclubny.org.

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