A well-researched reexamination of the war in Vietnam that is weakened by its political agenda.
Young, a former MACV/CORDS officer in the Vietnam War, challenges conventional narratives about the conflict.
“Losing the Vietnam War was traumatic for Americans,” writes the author, as the war not only devastated the lives of combatants but left an indelible mark on the national psyche. Young has published multiple books about Southeast Asia, co-translated a Vietnamese novel into English, and spent much of his post-war life advocating on behalf of Southeast Asian refugees. Young reflects on the ways his own life has been shaped by the war and the decisions made by politicians and diplomats in Washington, D.C. While he criticizes U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and other civilian leaders for ineptitude, no figure receives as much ire as President Richard Nixon’s national security advisor and secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. Supported by a treasure trove of archival materials from both American and Soviet sources, the most damning of which are replicated in the book’s appendix, the book makes a convincing case that Kissinger worked unilaterally in secret negotiations with the Soviets that granted unparalleled concessions to the North Vietnamese army. Proceeding from this central thesis, backed by impressive research necessitating nearly 500 endnotes, the book makes an effective case that America not only abandoned South Vietnam, but actively undermined its future as a viable, independent nation. But while trying to correct “the academic narrative that the Vietnam War was both immoral and unwinnable,” the author ignores the violence inflicted upon Vietnamese citizens by the American military; defoliant Agent Orange is only mentioned once in a passing reference, and the My Lai massacre and other atrocities are absent from the book’s narrative. So too are legitimate critiques of the war from outside “college campuses and among elite families,” especially those from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Panthers, who emphasized the war’s disproportionate impact on poor Black youth. Most disappointing and unnecessary is the book’s foray into today’s culture wars, offering clichéd and insubstantial attacks on the Green New Deal and “the reverse racism of critical race theory.”
A well-researched reexamination of the war in Vietnam that is weakened by its political agenda.Pub Date: May 23, 2023
ISBN: 9781637553596
Page Count: 432
Publisher: RealClear Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
HISTORY | MILITARY | UNITED STATES | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. In his fine introduction to this new edition, G. Kurt Piehler (History/Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville) celebrates Pyle’s “dense, descriptive style” and his unusual feel for the quotidian GI experience—a personal and human side to war left out of reporting on generals and their strategies. Though Piehler’s reminder about wartime censorship seems beside the point, his biographical context—Pyle was escaping a troubled marriage—is valuable. Kirkus, at the time, noted the hoopla over Pyle (Pulitzer, hugely popular syndicated column, BOMC hype) and decided it was all worth it: “the book doesn’t let the reader down.” Pyle, of course, captures “the human qualities” of men in combat, but he also provides “an extraordinary sense of the scope of the European war fronts, the variety of services involved, the men and their officers.” Despite Piehler’s current argument that Pyle ignored much of the war (particularly the seamier stuff), Kirkus in 1944 marveled at how much he was able to cover. Back then, we thought, “here’s a book that needs no selling.” Nowadays, a firm push might be needed to renew interest in this classic of modern journalism.
Pub Date: April 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-8768-2
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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