Professor of History Bob Brigham is the author of a new book being published by the University of Chicago Press. Brigham’s memoir, This is a True War Story, captures the improbable intertwining of his professional and personal history and the Vietnam War. The study of the Vietnam War shaped his professional identity and also linked him to his biological father, a fact unknown to him until a quest to identify his birth parents excavated a new family and a connection to a father who had been present in his professional life for decades.

“In a story shot through with echoes and shadows, Brigham not only reveals his own history as an adoptee but opens a startlingly fresh vantage on the fragility of American families; the power of social norms and taboos to shape lives; and the forces that inequitably disrupt families, not least of them war.”