Vietnam: A History by Stanley Karnow Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Vietnam: A History
Book Review: The best place to begin studying America's war in Vietnam.
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is an excellent factual overview of the American experience in Vietnam. Stanley Karnow was there, as a reporter, and this book has become a staple in the vast collection of American Vietnam War books.This is an excellent primer for those looking for a basic chronological understanding of the events of the war. Unlike so many of the more recent volumes on the subject, this book contains almost no speculation. This book is well researched, well written, and pretty safe, in that you can rely on the factual veracity of its contents.
If you're looking for complex political theories, you'll need to dive deeper into the subject, such as Logevall's Choosing War, or Kaiser's American Tragedy.
This book also contains some excellent, if standard, photographs, a basic chronology, and a very brief `cast of characters' that are all of use to the beginner. If you are said beginner, you also want to tackle Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie.
Book Review: The most accurate account of the Vietnam conflict I've read
Summary: 5 Stars
A brilliant telling of the history of Vietnam which shows the before and after of a nation so rapidly exposed to western civilization.Book Review: This is the best book I've read about Vietnam
Summary: 5 Stars
Karnow's journalistic style makes this an easy to read masterpiece. He explores not only the American involvement in the conflict, but the roots of Vietnamese nationalism, past conflicts, and the French involvement, and shows how many of the lessons we learned the hard way had already been learned by others. You finish the book having a better "understanding" of the conflict, not just the mechanics of the war.Book Review: Thorough & Fair-Minded Treatment Of America's War
Summary: 5 Stars
For those of us of certain age and particular life experience, this book sounds too much like a quite uncomfortable forced patrol down a very muddy, torpid, and uncertain memory lane. That said, I must confess that I was pleasantly surprised when I finally broke down my resolve to avoid reading it and then devoured this massively documented and carefully researched book on Vietnam by journalist Stanley Karnow. It is indeed a fair-minded, comprehensive and well-constructed chronological look at one of the most ill-fated and unfortunate military efforts in modern American history, and one holds his breath in recognizing the risks as we start down that ineluctable path toward greater and greater commitments of men and material in a vain effort to force from outside a predetermined political solution for Vietnam for which there was little of no popular support within the country itself. As in Korea, the international concerns for providing separate areas of political influence for both the communists and the "democratic forces" at the close of WWII as a practical way of settling issues with the Soviet Union led to the partitioning of the country. This ultimately led to the establishment of an innately unstable political situation that by being both arbitrary and locally unpopular literally begged at indigenous attempts to alter the modus vivendi. As a result, through our lack of understanding and our arrogance, we consistently insisted on various courses of actions that were not only indifferent to the actual politics of the area, but were deaf, dumb, and blind to the ways in which such actions inevitably served to progressively alienate us from the indigenous people and their strong and quite insistent political will.
From the beginning, when we agreed as a friendly gesture to set aside our better judgment and allow the French to regain their colonial holdings in what was then popularly referred to as Indochina, everything went wrong. The popular leader of the indigenous Vietnamese anti-Japanese guerrilla movement, Ho Chi Minh, asked for American support but was refused based on our ill-advised attempts to appease the French by allowing them to return to the area. As the resistance to the French colonial regime mounted, it was increasingly clear the French had their hands full. And by the fall of the French at Dienbienphu in 1954, the Vietnamese were running a very effective, forceful, and determined effort to drive the colonialists out of the country.
Thus, throughout the 1950s we pursued policies that not only alienated the popular leaders like Ho, but also supported blatantly corrupt and profoundly anti-democratic autocrats like the Diems in South Vietnam as a countermeasure against the strong communist regime north of the lines of partitioning. American foreign policy in the 1950s and 1960s was so completely dominated by our naïve perception of a united worldwide communist movement to conquer the world that we responded by supporting whoever we viewed as strong enough to prevent such local communist takeovers. Thus Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson each pursued a consistent policy of communist containment in Vietnam that led to increasing American support for whatever regime currently in power in the south. After Kennedy's death, that escalation took wings.
The author's approach does much to organize and rationalize the chronology of events, and one finds himself swept along recognizing that we are being sucked into a vortex with no clear point of extraction should things backfire. And during the next ten years, from 1964 to 1974, everything that could go wrong surely did. All of it is covered graphically, compassionately, and comprehensively in this massive, entertaining, and quite literate history of America's tragic involvement in the longest and most painful modern in its history. There are other excellent books on Vietnam, such as Frances Fitzgerald's "Fire In The Lake" and Neil Sheehan's "A Bright Shining Lie", but neither of those books stands as quite the accomplished work of objective, accurate, and well-documented chronological history that this book is. I highly recommend it, and hope it finds its way to rest on your bookshelf.
Book Review: Too Much Ancient History
Summary: 3 Stars
This very large and very detailed book spends WAY TOO MUCH time discussing ancient Vietnamese history. For about half the book, the author goes into exhausting detail about Vietnam's history from the 10th and 11th Century. The reader is bombarded with information about every king, queen, prime minister that ever lived. At times, entire chapters are made up of nothing but unpronounceable names of dynasties, princes, and tribes. Only in the final 2-3 chapters (out of 10-11) does the author finally get into the modern day details about the war. Skip the first half of the book and head right towards the last few chapters.