The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam is a book by Tom Bissell.
Tom Bissell is a journalist, critic, and fiction writer, originally from Escanaba, Michigan and currently based in Portland, Oregon. He studied English at Michigan State University in East Lansing. In 1996, the 22-year-old went to Uzbekistan as a volunteer for the Peace Corps. He was there for... seven months before returning home. He then worked as a book editor in New York City and published, among other books, The Collected Stories of Richard Yates and Paula Fox's memoir Borrowed Finery.. He writes for Harper's Magazine, Slate, The New Republic, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, where he is a contributing editor. While much of Bissell's magazine writing could be considered travel writing, his articles are more concerned with politics, history, and autobiography than tourism. As a journalist he traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan during wartime. While Bissell has been critical of neo-conservatism, the Bush administration, and American unilateralism, his politics often do not fit within established categories of American liberalism and conservatism. Much of his work is concerned with the legacy of the Soviet Union and Communism.more
Non-fiction is the form of any narrative, account, or other communicative work whose assertions and descriptions are understood to be factual. This... presentation may be accurate or not—that is, it can give either a true or a false account of the subject in question—however, it is generally assumed that authors of such accounts believe them to be truthful at the time of their composition or, at least, pose them to their audience as historically or empirically true. Note that reporting the beliefs of others in a non-fiction format is not necessarily an endorsement of the ultimate veracity of those beliefs, it is simply saying it is true that people believe them . Non-fiction can also be written about fiction, giving information about these other works. Non-fiction is one of the two main divisions in writing, particularly used in libraries, the other form being fiction. However, non-fiction need not be written text necessarily, since pictures and film can also purport to present a factual account of a subject.more