Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I read this book as part of a monthly book club's reading list; I was disappointed in it, and marvel that it earned a Pulitzer Prize. This book took me back to the Vietnam era and the Boat People era, and that is a time when, in real life (as well as in books) there were few sympathetic characters. The book includes a send-up of Apocalypse Now, another Vietnam-era story with no sympathetic characters. So, while this might be true-to-life (in some ways I'm sure it is), this isn't a life I'm eager to revisit. Normally I don't down-rate books, as I have no desire to hurt other authors, but since this one won a Pulitzer, there's vanishingly little chance that my review will hurt the author or the book's sales, I want to warn readers that this is tough, gritty, disturbing and powerful (but not in a good way).