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What We Inherit: A Secret War and a Family’s Search for Answers
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73
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Readers
78/100Critics
67/100Scholars
Author:
Jessica Pearce Rotondi
Publisher:
The Unnamed Press
Date:
April 21, 2020
After years of being misled by the U.S. government, Jessica Pearce Rotondi travels to Laos with the hope of finding answers for her family, but instead finds a country still reeling from a secret war and excavates trauma on a personal and national scale.
What The Reviewers Say
This story is exactly what I needed.
Jessica Pearce Rotondi’s tragic family history has gifted her with one heck of a story to tell, a story she’d surely sacrifice if she could change the past.
In her powerful, heartbreaking, and gut-wrenching first book, Rotondi explains how in 2009, after her mother’s death, she found boxes of files, newspaper clippings, and declassified CIA reports regarding her Uncle Jack and the family’s search for him.
The author’s precise attention to detail conjures up the jungle heat and humidity as well as the pervasive poverty that plagues Laos, and she effectively captures her family’s daily struggle and the toll their quest took on their personal health. The narrative is moving and dramatic as the author shares the alternately heartbreaking and triumphant moments of this intergenerational search for the truth. At intervals in the well-written text, Rotondi also shares details about the CIA’s 'Secret War' in Laos.
