This is an emotional and stirring story of Matthew, a surgeon in 1967 who is drafted into the Vietnam War. Hoping to be of help but finding himself becoming increasingly disillusioned he becomes depressed, takes to the bottle and his life goes a bit off balance from there.

The story is very poignant and somewhat heart-breaking but a completely absorbing book that once you start reading you just can't stop. It makes you feel so emotional and sad, at times empty and angry but you just must keep reading as you always have hope that things will get better.

Books like this make you realise how horrendous wars are and what the people have to contend with not just during the war but for many years after. I am still thinking about it and it is still in my mind and that is what a good book does. Well written and a must read.

Dr. Michael Barrett is on his way to Vietnam in the 1960s. He is assigned there as a surgeon. He is not the typical surgeon or doctor. He cares a lot about his patients. He sees so many dead and dying. He sees even more maimed and scarred mentally and physically. He himself is forever changed and is mentally and physically exhausted by the unending surgery, violence, tragedy, and poor leadership in his field hospital. He isn't sure he can make a year there in this place he feels is Hell.
Somewhere in the present time, a plane is attacked by terrorists. On that plane is a man who is mortally injured. The influx of patients to the hospital makes treating one with no chance of survival relegated to an untried intern. She listens to his story. It is one of triumph of the human spirit over horrible circumstances. It is the story of love and compassion. It is the story of Michael Barrett.
To say more of the plot would be a spoiler to the reader. I will say that it is an important book. Any book that reveals the tragedy of war, the horrors of it to its citizenry and soldiers is important. It does not matter why the war is started, one must examine the human cost, the long-term effect of its worth. The characters in this book are well developed. The plot and explicit narrative hold the reader's interest.
The legal aspect of Dr. Barrett's journey were interesting but at first, confusing to me as the reader but it did not distract from the story and added to Dr. Barrett's stresses in the end. The book was well-researched and while fiction, it displayed a raw reality that only a surgeon could tell. The book will make you think. It is a heartfelt accounting of an era that is still painful in the hearts and minds of many of our citizenry and one we all should be aware of. I hope to read more books from Michael J. Collins, the author. I highly recommend this one. Thanks to #AllBleedingStops#NetGalley for the opportunity to read this important book.

Matthew Barrett, a surgeon fresh out of residency in 1967 is drafted and sent sent to Pho Bai, Vietnam. At first hopeful that he can make a difference, he is quickly left feeling disillusioned by all the blood and death. He spirals into depression and alcoholism and only the love of Therese, a nurse stationed in his hospital, can make a difference. But when he fails to save one specific life, he is left reeling, unable to perform surgery anymore without flashbacks of his failure.
I'm feeling so emotional after reading this book. This phenomenal story is going to stick with me for a long time.
I received an advance reader copy of this book through NetGalley. The views and opinions expressed in this review are completely my own and given voluntarily.

Small wonder that Matthew Barrett, the Vietnam-traumatized surgeon in Michael Collins' "All Bleeding Stops," is smitten with new nurse Therese Hopkins -- with her attractiveness and tastes for poetry and classical music, she's the idolized sort of woman common to much male-written fiction which also typically requires that relationships with such women come to a tragic end. And indeed Matthew and Therese's romance comes to a particularly bad end all the more poignant for a final-pages revelation which for all its added heartache nevertheless put me off a bit for how the disclosure is withheld for a time in the way of a mystery novel rather than realistic war fiction.
Still, Matthew and Therese's affair, for all its idealized aspect, makes for the few hopeful moments in a novel otherwise relentlessly grim in its depiction of carnage, first in Vietnam and then in Africa and then again many years later in a plane-crash aftermath scene at a Loyola hospital where another young medical woman, to me more appealing than Therese for her more realistic presentation, tends to a man whom the crash has left with an injury as traumatic as any of those seen by Matthew in Vietnam and who is obviously tied to the Vietnam story in some way that challenges readers to determine.
And as if two story lines weren’t enough for a reader to process, there's still a third in which a lawyer details how Barrett came to be up for a court-martial for certain of his actions in Vietnam. It’s the weakest of the novel’s three sections, though, which is unfortunate for its potential to have provided greater insight into Barrett's inner demons in the way that a background section of
fellow heart-of-darkness writer Philip Caputo's "Horn of Africa" shed light on the inner landscapes of one of that novel's principal characters. Indeed, any number of times as I read Collins' work I was put in mind of Caputo, both for "Horn," with its as-much-psychological-as- physical excursion into the morass of the Dark Continent, as well as his "Rumor of War," which with its equally powerful nonfiction treatment of the Vietnam War has been touted as perhaps the best work to come out of that conflict.
But it was more "Horn" that I was put in mind of for its probing exploration of the human capacity for awful behavior in extreme situations, a kind of psychological excavation that Collins' novel could have used more of, particularly in its presentation of the relationship of Matthew and Therese, which as I've said is weak on the nitty-gritty of real-life relationships. By contrast, the novel's sections about the Loyola internist are especially strong in a novel with both strong and weak sections, the weakest to my mind being a midsection in which Matthew is involved with organ transplants, while the Biafra part is every bit as strong as the Vietnam section, even if some explanatory material about the Biafra conflict seemed obtrusive, welcome as it might be for readers unfamiliar with that situation.
Though for that matter many of the details of the Vietnam War will undoubtedly be unfamiliar to younger readers today, even as they resonate with people of my age whose equanimity was regularly upset by the ever-mounting body count we were regularly assaulted with on TV. A sobering lesson it made for, that nightly reminder of the consequences of America's misadventures abroad, and Collins’ novel, with its revisiting of that unsettling time, provides valuable historical perspective at a time when the unfolding situation in Afghanistan is hauntingly evocative of the final days of the Vietnam quagmire. A notable achievement just for that, Collins’ novel, as well as an affecting depiction of a doomed love which for all its less-than-realistic aspects still made for a lachrymose moment or two from this not-so-easily brought-to-tears reviewer.
A writer to watch, Collins.

'All Bleeding Stops’ is a powerful story, told in equally powerful language. It had a profound impact on me and, long after reading the last word, I was musing about my impressions: the fragility of the human psyche when confronted with trauma - especially so when it is ongoing, and the double-edged sword of compassion that can become self-destructive when it is allowed to come too close and become too personal.

The book’s protagonist is Matthew Barrett, a young surgeon drafted into the U.S. Navy and detailed to Phu Bai, Vietnam, eager to begin his surgical career in earnest. I witnessed the gradual unravelling of his psyche bombarded by horror, the unending exposure to broken bodies, his perceived powerlessness in the face of irreparable damage to young lives: death, dismemberment, disfigurement, shattered futures, broken lives; all that in spite of his heroic, exhausting, never-ending attempts to repair and save - and fix. And his dawning despair, his increasing revulsion with the destruction of lives, his impotence to save that one important life, leading to the final moment of utter disgust with himself. By the time he returns from Vietnam, Matthew is broken, and caught between either practicing his surgical skills on dead bodies, or giving compassionate assistance to the living. He chooses the latter - in another horrific war.

I was completely absorbed by Matthew’s story; the commanding prose and powerful images held me in thrall. I could strongly identify with him and commiserate with his pain, despair, guilt, rage, and emptiness. I empathised with Packy and was uplifted by Denis and Therese, all these other well-defined and -developed characters. I loved every minute of reading this book and would gladly afford it a plus sign behind the five stars!

My sincere thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for this spellbinding  eARC!