Vietnam War
How to define the Vietnam War? U.S. involvement from 1955-1975, sometimes justly labeled as the Second Indochina War? French attempting to retain its colonial empire post-WWII, 1945-1954, sometimes called the First Indochina War? Japan had occupied Southeast Asia during World War II. The literature is vast and complex. For the purpose of highlighting what I have here in the store, however, you will find this page’s parameters include the end of the French, the twenty years of the U.S. presence, and some fiction and other retrospective literature to the present day.
The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam
The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam
Praised as a "superb scholarly achievement" (Foreign Policy), The Road Not Taken confirms Max Boot's role as a "master chronicler" (Washington Times) of American military affairs. Through dozens of interviews and never-before-seen documents, Boot rescues Edward Lansdale (1908-1987) from historical ignominy to "restore a sense of proportion" to this "political Svengali, or 'Lawrence of Asia' "(The New Yorker). Boot demonstrates how Lansdale, the man said to be the fictional model for Graham Greene's The Quiet American, pioneered a "hearts and minds" diplomacy, first in the Philippines and then in Vietnam. Bringing a tragic complexity to Lansdale and a nuanced analysis to his visionary foreign policy, Boot suggests Vietnam could have been different had we only listened.
With contemporary reverberations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, The Road Not Taken is a "judicious and absorbing" (New York Times Book Review) biography of lasting historical consequence.