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You Are Here: Home > History Books > Football History > Item 19
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Vietnam: A History
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by Stanley Karnow
Sales Rank: 19514
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List Price: $21.00
$14.28
At Amazon
on 9-14-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Paperback with 784 pages
Published by: Penguin Non-ClassicsEdition: 2nd Edition June 1, 1997
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0140265473
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0140265477
Book Dimensions:
9.1 x 6 x 1.3 inches
Weighs: 1.4 pounds
Card Catalog Description
This monumental narrative clarifies, analyzes, and demystifies the tragic ordeal of the Vietnam war. Free of ideological bias, profound in its understanding, and compassionate in its human portrayals, it is filled with fresh revelations drawn from secret documents and from exclusive interviews with the participants - French, American, Vietnamese, Chinese: diplomats, military commanders, high government officials, journalists, nurses, workers, and soldiers. Vietnam: A History puts events and decisions into such sharp focus that we come to understand - and make peace with - a convulsive epoch of our recent history.
Reader Reviews
This book has many merits: It is comprehensive, it attempts to explain Vietnamese history, and it is full of on the spot interviews and remembrances. This remains the basic history text of record on American involvement in Vietnam. There is a breadth of perspective here that is lacking in many accounts of this most up-close and personal of wars. Despite these advantages, the book has some real limitations. The writing is pedestrian, the characterizations (if one can say that about history) tend to be thin, and Karnow fails to convey a sense of wholeness in many chapters. The book at times feels more like a collection of dispatches from a reporter in the field (which Karnow was in Vietnam) rather than the work of a historian who has integrated fact and theory based on deep understanding and research. As comprehensive as the book tries to be, Karow's reach may have exeeded his grasp with his project. The book also suffers from a real bias against American involvement and the American establishment, Republican and Democratic. When "Uncle Ho" commits murders in the thousands the book makes one feel like this is a natural outpouring of exuburant nationalism rather than good old fashioned absolutism. But when the admittedly corrupt and inept Diem regime or confused ARVN or American soldiers commit atrocities, the condemnation is acid and biting. Communists are presented as "golden," or "tough," while Southerners or Amercians are usually charactured as "greedy," or "arrogant." There is also an irony in the book's approach. Karnow should be complemented for attempting to fit American involvement in Vietnam into the wider context of Vietnam's history. However, Vietnam's history is presented mostly through lense of Western or Colonial contact. There is little sense of Vietnam as a nation, and its people, religion and history are merely players on the stage of American Imperialism. In suggesting that the policy of containment as expressed in the Vietnam war was a misjudgment of Vietnamese Nationalism (which is now common wisdom), Karnow ironically describes that nation as through an American TV camera, rather than a Vietnamese watercolor. Now, almost twenty years after it was written, the Vietnam: A History still has valuable perspective and information. But be forewarned: This is a myopic document of American journalistic self-analysis.
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Vietnam: A History
Available from Amazon
Price: $14.28
Updated on 9-14-2008.
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