Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
Run For The Wall : Remembering Vietnam on a Motorcycle Pilgrimage, Paperback / softback Book

Run For The Wall : Remembering Vietnam on a Motorcycle Pilgrimage Paperback / softback

Paperback / softback

Item not Available

Description

Every May, for more than a decade, an ever-increasing number of motorcyclists have made the “Run for the Wall,” a cross-country journey from Southern California to the “Wall,” the Vietnam war memorial in Washington, D.C.

While the journey’s avowed purpose is political — to increase public awareness about those who remain either prisoners of war or missing in action in Southeast Asia — it also serves as a healing pilgrimage for its participants and as a “welcome-home” ritual many veterans feel they never received. Run for the Wall is a highly readable ethnographic account of this remarkable American ritual.

The authors, themselves motorcyclists as well as Run participants, demonstrate that the event is a form of secular pilgrimage.

Here key concepts in American culture— “freedom,” and “brotherhood,” for example—are constructed and deployed in a variety of rituals and symbols to enable participants to come to terms with the consequences of the Vietnam war.

While the focus is the journey itself, the book also explores other themes related to American culture and history, including the nature of community, the Vietnam war, and the creation of American secular ritual. In moving, first-hand accounts, the book tells how participation in the POW-MIA social movement helps individuals find personal and collective meaning in America’s longest and most divisive conflict.

Above all, this is a story of a uniquely American form of political action, ritual, pilgrimage, and the social construction of memory.

Information

£30.95

Item not Available
Item not Available
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information