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
Gessen is a Suetonius for our time, documenting the death of the old America while holding out slim hope for its restoration.
The National Book Award winner delivers a handbook for an age in which egomania is morphing into autocracy at warp speed.
New Yorker contributor Gessen, an immigrant from what was then the Soviet Union, understands totalitarian systems, especially the ways in which, under totalitarian rule, language is degraded into meaninglessness. Today, writes the author, we are “using the language of political disagreement, judicial procedure, or partisan discussion to describe something that was crushing the system that such terminology was invented to describe.” Against that, Gessen suggests, we now have an administration for which words hold no reality, advancing the idea that “alternative facts” are fine but professing dismay when one calls them lies. The step-by-step degradation of democratic institutions that follows is a modern-day rejoinder to the fact that more than half a dozen years separated the Reichstag fire from World War II. That’s a big buffer of time in which to admit all manner of corruption, and all manner of corruption is what we’ve been seeing: Gessen reminds us about Mick Mulvaney’s accepting handsome gifts from the payday-loan industry he was supposed to regulate and Ben Carson’s attempt to stock his office with a $31,000 dining-room set. Yet corruption’s not the right word, writes the author, since Trump and company are quite open and even boastful about what used to be a matter of shame and duplicity. The real tragedy, it seems, is that they have been so successful in creating what the author calls a “new, smaller American society,” one that willfully excludes the Other. Many writers have chronicled the Trump administration’s missteps and crimes, but few as concisely as Gessen, and her book belongs on the shelf alongside Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny and Amy Siskind’s The List as a record of how far we have fallen.
Gessen is a Suetonius for our time, documenting the death of the old America while holding out slim hope for its restoration.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-18893-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
