Vietnam: A History

See Larger Image	List Price: $21.00 Our Price: $14.28 Your Save: $ 6.72 ( 32% ) Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics) Written By: Stanley Karnow Average Customer Rating:


Binding: Paperback Dewey Decimal Number: 959.7043373 EAN: 9780140265477 ISBN: 0140265473 Label: Penguin (Non-Classics) Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics) Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 784 Publication Date: 1997-06-01 Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) Studio: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Related Items A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam The Best and the Brightest Major Problems in the History of the Vietnam War: Documents and Essays (Major Problems in American History) Four Hours in My Lai A Vietcong Memoir: An Inside Account of the Vietnam War and Its Aftermath
Editorial Reviews: Provides a comprehensive look at both sides of the Vietnam War through a collection of personal tales and delves into the political and military events in the United States and elsewhere that originally caused the war and the brought it to an end. Reprint. TV tie-in."
Spotlight customer reviews: Customer Rating: Summary: George Ball had it right Comment: This is an excellent choice for those wanting to know how the US got involved in Vietnam, why we stayed so long, and how the end game played out. That is why I got the book, and I was not expecting to find the earlier history, involving the French, to be very interesting. But I was surprised by how absorbing that subject was. I grew up during the Vietnam War, but didn't follow it very closely, and so this book was amazing to read. I shook my head a lot, and sat there staring off into space amazed at what LBJ set in motion. I also imagined arguing with someone who still thinks we could have "won" the war, how futile that discussion would be. An excellent companion book is the oral history by Chris Appy. It's a perfect complement to this somewhat detached volume. Customer Rating: Summary: Fully Referenced Comment: Of all the books on the subject of what the people of Vn call The American War, this book stands out. It's written by someone who was actually there but not biased by having fought for one side or the other. Best of all it's fully referenced, Karnow backs up everything he says. It gives an excellent history of Vietnam showing it's history of being occupied, it's heroes from centuries ago (many women warriors) on up through the French and how the USA got stuck into it. You won't go wrong by buying this book. Customer Rating: Summary: Too Much Ancient History Comment: 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. Customer Rating: Summary: Good but lacking and lopsided Comment: For a so-called "complete" history of Vietnam, this book was decidedly lopsided in some areas. For example, he spends hundreds of pages with useful and interesting pre-1965 historical background, but then skims over the post-1969 events, which were some of the most crucial. He does the same with the political leaders involved, describing Generals Ky and Khan, even though each of them only ruled for a short period of time, while devoting little time to exploring Thieu's biography, even though he played the dominant role for much of our involvement there. For the Kennedy-Johnson administrations, Karnow provides rich details of the internal debates, politics, and considerations. One gets the sense that the author's contacts ran out after Nixon won the election, so he doesn't really discuss this period in nearly as much depth. Overall, I would preferred if the author had given us a bit more of a sense of South Vietnam, why it did not fight and was riddled with corruption, the personalities involved, etc. The best parts of the book are undoubtedly when he recalls interviews from vietnamese, North and South, who played key roles, providing fresh information. This book was a useful overview of the Vietnam War and its roots, but doesn't really provide any new insights or in-depth understanding of Vietnam the country. Customer Rating: Summary: poorly researched and providing little insight into the war Comment: This book has given an authority that its contents and research in no way deserves. A more appopriate title would be "Vietnam: An American mythology" because facts be damned, Karnow is dedicated to telling the story he wants to tell. The first thing to understand is that the majority of this book does not concern itself with America's "vietnam war" in terms of the large conventional conflict between 1965 and 1975. Karnow spends the first 426 pages leading up to 1965. What should be background in some sense consumes the book. And in terms of the book, the historical subjects are where Karnow's knowledge is worst. As an example, Karnow describes Chinese, Roman and 19th century french methods of rule as essentially the same system. He fails to grasp that Vietnam was under chinese rule for the majority of its history and that "nationalism" was the exception rather than the rule. His coverage of Ho Chi Minh essentially is the propoganda view of the man himself. Karnow is incapable of looking beyond it or doing original research on his subject. He gets the facts of what happened in 1945 completely wrong. He buy's into Ho's propoganda that the Ho led a popular "revolution" against the Japanese. In reality, the surrendering Japanese in 1945 handed over power to a variety of local groups with the goal of causing the allies trouble. Contrary to Karnow's poor research, there was no revolution in 1945 and there was no Viet Minh "government" except on paper. The Viet Minh were so weak that they were pushed aside by the local french within a few weeks without even support from the outside. Karnow disposes of the French war in Vietnam in around 30 pages. Following the mythology script, he focuses most of his attention on Dien Bien Phu and ignores the complexity and details of the French phase. Its a superficial account at best. The Eisenhower and Kennedy chapters on Diem show off Karnow's basic ignorance of the situation in Vietnam at that time. Rather than being about Vietnam, its more like Vietnam as seen by Washington in those years. There is no attempt at understanding the actual politics of the Diem era. The information on North Vietnam (or as Karnow strangely refers to them "the communists") is completely lacking. The internal politics of North Vietnam are ignored as much as possible. As an example of Karnow's strange views: "In May 1959, the North Vietnamese leadership created a unit called Group 559, its task to begin enlarging the tradtional communist infiltration route, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, into the south." Group 559 in reality launched an invasion of Laos putting a large part of the territory of that counry under Vietnamese rule which continues on even now. Karnow's notion of a "traditional infiltration route" is completely false. North Vietnam invaded Laos to flank the border of south vietnam and to use occupied Laos as a base for attacking Vietnam. As the book goes on, Karnow presents the traditional mythology about peaceful neutral cambodia. What he fails to say is that Sihanouk was a dictator who murdered his opponents and kept power by alternately allying himself with the left and the right. He also fails to mention the well-known fact that rather than being neutral, Sihanouk (and cambodia) had signed a deal with China were their rice crop would be bought at an inflated price in exchange for opening cambodian ports to arms shipments and allowing Vietnamese bases on cambodian soil. The so-called "neutrality" story that Karnow repeats is nonsense. The last couple of hundred pages that cover the war itself give a mixed up account that does a disservice to both the military and political history of the war. He doesn't understand how the war was fought in Vietnam, he doesn't understand the politics of any of the players and he is deeply attached to the mythology that vietnam was a "gureilla war" fought against a local insurgency. He doesn't pick up on the fact that Vietnam was largely a conventional war fought between large units with no front lines. Entire divisions of north vietnam came south to fight american divisions in the field. The counterinsurgency mythology of vietnam on the part of Karnow and many others is in no small part due to the fact that reporters were stationed in Saigon and did day-trips out to counterinsurgency operations in the Saigon area. And Karnow gets how the war ended completely wrong. The war ended because the entire North Vietnamese army launched a conventional military invasion with tanks over the border. In the end, the "invincible" insurgency in the countryside couldn't win anything. Karnow is also useless in terms of the legacy of the war. The book ends with the North Vietnamese celebrating their victory in Saigon. He doesn't cover the disaster of the postwar era. He doesn't cover the irony of "Imperial" Vietnam turning Laos and Cambodia into colonies within a few years of the war except to note it as minimally as he can. While we get hundreds of pages of history on the front end of the war, North Vietnam marching into Saigon is the end of history. In summary this is a bad book. It spends way too many pages on the wrong subjects, suffers from a lack of research, depends too much on anicdotal views of history and presents an utterly misleading version of the war. For those who want a complete (but very dry) accurate military history of the conflict, I suggest "The Rise and Fall of an American Army by Shelby Stanton." For those interested in the complete story of Cambodia, I would suggest the first half of Pol Pot Anatomy of a Nightmare by Philip Short. Stanley Karnow is an appaulingly bad historian and I keep hoping for a more accurate generalist history of the war to eclipse this book. But there still is nothing out there. More Reviews