Vietnam

Starred review from August 1, 2018
The prolific, prizewinning military historian turns his attention to the Vietnam War.Having defeated the French after a bitter war, Vietnamese forces under Ho Chi Minh expected to govern Vietnam, but in 1954, the Geneva Conference awarded them only the northern half. Ironically, Ho's frustration was engineered by the Soviet Union and China, whose priority was to avoid intervention from the United States. Of course, the U.S. eventually intervened. Hastings (The Secret War: Spies, Ciphers, and Guerrillas, 1939-1945, 2016, etc.) lets no one off the hook. "In the years that followed the Geneva Accords," he writes, "it was the misfortune of both Vietnams to fall into the hands of cruel and incompetent governments....The war that now gained momentum was one that neither side deserved to win." The author brings his usual brilliant descriptive skills to the action, mixing individual anecdotes with big-picture considerations. Stupidity was rampant on both sides, and the North Vietnamese generalship was not immune; all combatants committed terrible atrocities. Hastings does not conceal his contempt for America's anti-war movement. He makes a good case that fear of the draft stimulated many participants, and readers will squirm as he quotes many of its leaders' praise of Ho and his freedom fighters. He also offers a virtuoso account of the 1968 Tet Offensive, which was a disaster for the North but convinced many hawks that the war was unwinnable. Richard Nixon's election in 1968 showed that most Americans opposed a quick withdrawal, but his cynical goal (revealed by his own tapes) was to avoid blame for the inevitable communist victory, and he achieved it. No domino fell after 1975, as a united Vietnam faded into impoverished Stalinist isolation. The sole satisfying outcome of two recent American interventions in poor nations with incompetent governments is likely to be more superb histories by Hastings.A definitive history, gripping from start to finish but relentlessly disturbing.

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October 15, 2018
Historian Hastings (The Secret War), serves up a mammoth history of the Vietnam war, drawing on many secondary and primary sources and interviews he conducted with veterans of all sides. The book, he says, is not an attempt to “chronicle or even mention every action”; rather, it’s intended to “capture the spirit of Vietnam’s experience” for the general reader. Much of the book covers well-trod but appropriate ground: Dien Bien Phu, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the Tet offensive, the perfidies of Nixon and Kissinger and North Vietnam’s Le Duan, and so on. Many of Hastings’s conclusions are sound, but one calls the enterprise into question: writing about Americans who served in the war, Hastings says, “Maybe two-thirds of the men who came home calling themselves veterans—entitled to wear the medal and talk about their PTSD troubles—had been exposed to no greater risk than a man might incur from ill-judged sex or ‘bad shit’ drugs.” In addition to being factually questionable, this rhetoric is likely to alienate readers who have a personal connection to the war. Readers interested in recent in-depth Vietnam histories might do better to look to Road to Disaster: A New History of America’s Descent into Vietnam.

September 1, 2018

Prize-winning journalist/author Hastings reported on the Vietnam War from the United States in 1967-68 and thence from Indochina, leaving the U.S. embassy by helicopter during the final evacuation in 1975. So he can offer a thoroughgoing account of the war. With a 150,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 1, 2018
Forty-three years after North Vietnamese tanks smashed into Saigon and the "official" American presence in South Vietnam ended, there is a serious effort underway to re-examine the American experience in Vietnam, manifested by Mark Bowden's ?Hu� 1968 ? (2017), Max Boot's The Road Not Taken (2018), and Ken Burns and Geoffrey C. Ward's The Vietnam War (2017). In his comprehensive, brilliant, and heartbreaking account, Hastings (The Secret War?, 2016) views the 30 years of war against French colonialism and American interference as one long tragedy for the people of Vietnam. For every American death, at least 40 Vietnamese died, many of them noncombatants. Vietnam suffered under a vicious, violent Stalinist regime in the North, a corrupt series of warlords in the South, and the French and Americans who viewed them as pieces on a chessboard in a larger game. Individual acts of courage and nobility are recounted here among mind-numbing acts of savagery, but there are few heroes. Hastings even portrays many antiwar protesters in the U.S. as cynical, infantile, or simply wanting to avoid death in a distant land. This isn't an easy read, but it is an essential one to comprehend the totality of the wars in that long-besieged country.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

Starred review from September 1, 2018

Award-winning journalist Hastings (The Secret War), who previously covered the Vietnam War, now revisits the conflict from start to finish; laying out what happened both in the United States and Vietnam and interspersing throughout personal reminiscences of its participants. In the process, the author corrects myths: Ho Chi Minh was not a nationalist first and Communist second; South Vietnamese abuses were reprehensible, but less than the abuses of the North, which were hidden from Western eyes; American forces were, in fact, winning the battle against the Viet Cong in the summer and fall of 1972. Hastings also maintains that the American press played a role in rousing disaffection with the war but, in his judgment, the most egregious error of American leaders was hiding the facts of the war from the people. Several individuals in this account are depicted in a negative light, especially Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who decided to end the war but still sent American soldiers into battle in order to win an election. VERDICT Will appeal to more than military and political history lovers; it may become one of the standard accounts of the war. [See Prepub Alert, 4/9/18.]--David Keymer, Cleveland

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.