The New York Times Book Review - Mark Atwood Lawrence
…monumental…In [Hastings's] telling, it was a conflict without good guys, an appalling conflagration in which the brutality, cynicism and incompetence of the United States and its South Vietnamese ally were equaled only by the wickedness of their enemies, leaving the hapless bulk of the Vietnamese population to suffer the consequences…It's a depressing but also curiously refreshing and mostly convincing way of thinking about the war. All too often…historians have treated it as a morality play pitting the forces of justice against the forces of repression…Hastings is hardly the first to suggest something more complicated. But the strongest tendency among chroniclers inclined to paint in shades of gray…has been to credit all sides with fighting sincerely for principles that made sense to them. Hastings goes in a darker direction, finding rough parity not in the validity of the goals for which the rivals fought but in their insensitivity to the staggering destruction they wrought…He deserves enormous credit for helping us, half a century after the peak of the fighting, to see beyond old arguments about which side was right. What is visible when the blinders come off is indeed no pretty sight.
Publishers Weekly
10/15/2018
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. (Oct.)
General David Petraeus (US Army
A characteristically brilliant, monumental work by Max Hastings that masterfully presents the political, cultural, military, and social factors that produced the most divisive and disastrous conflict in American history. Hastings synthesizes innumerable sources, including many from North Vietnam, that, in an unflinching, clear-eyed manner capture the brutality of both sides in this war, as well as the heroism and the ineptitude, the public confidence and the inner doubts that resulted in the tragedy that was Vietnam – a war that Hastings implies neither side deserved to win.”
Tim O’Brien
This is a comprehensive, spellbinding, surprisingly intimate, and altogether magnificent historical narrative.
National War College Professor Mark Clodfelter
Max Hastings’ meticulously researched, superbly written account will now become the standard by which all other histories of the Vietnam War are judged. He leaves no stone unturned in examining three decades of conflict from the vantage points of all combatants at all levels—from offices in Washington, Hanoi, and Saigon and conference tables in Geneva and Paris, to treacherous trips down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, savage fire-fights in jungles and rice paddies, and terror-inducing air attacks. The result is a work both eminently readable and definitive.
Karl Marlantes
This balanced and insightful book is a pleasure to read. It destroys the fantasy that one side or the other held the moral high ground or a monopoly on devastating folly.
NPR.org
We’ve seen a shelf-load of histories, analyses, memoirs, and novels on Vietnam. But what Hastings does in Vietnam is pull all these genres together in a highly readable and vivid narrative that, I think, will become the standard on the war for many years to come.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Hastings’ Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy: 1945-1975 might be the best overview of the French and American failures in southeast Asia to yet appear, incorporating as it does some of the more recent revisionist research that balances out earlier, more ideologically tendentious interpretations drawn from the anti-war movement and the 1960s ‘New Left’”.
Pittsburgh Post Gazette
A comprehensive and compelling narrative that illuminates political and military tactics and strategies — and the daily realities of a war that killed 2 million people.
New York Post
A gripping, well-researched look at a divisive American war.
New York Post
A gripping, well-researched look at a divisive American war.
New York Times Book Review
Hastings sees the Vietnam War in much the same way as that anguished villager. In his telling, it was a conflict without good guys....Through vivid accounts of battle and suffering, Hastings shows that the American war machine devastated the society it intended to save....he deserves enormous credit for helping us, half a century after the peak of the fighting, to see beyond old arguments about which side was right. What is visible when the blinders come off is indeed no pretty sight.
Financial Times
Exceptionally thorough…[Hastings’s] greatest service is to demystify the Vietnam war and to place this conflict squarely into a broader history of other wars of the 20th century. Who better to accomplish this task than Hastings, who in previous works has helped us understand the first world war’s Battle of the Argonne Forest, the Normandy invasion of the second world war, and the Battle of Chosin Reservoir in Korea?
Houston Chronicle
“Vietnam is a product of Hastings’ prodigious research and his aptitude for pungent judgments. It is an unsparing look, by a warm friend of America, at the mountain of mendacities, political and military….Almost every Hastings page contains riveting facts…. as successful as printed words can be in achieving his aim of answering the question ‘What was the war like?’
The Guardian
Hastings has been going to the wars for close on half a century. Fascinated since he was a boy by all things military, he has reported with distinction on many conflicts as well as writing as a historian about those that occurred before his time. It has been an obsession, but one that he has nurtured into a major talent... Now he has turned his formidable guns on the Vietnam war…This is a work of considerable quality, marked by a possibly unique combination of military expertise, historical grasp and journalistic skill in unearthing hitherto undiscovered human stories of the war, as well as judiciously selecting from among others already known. It helps, too, not to be an American, because that lends a certain useful distance…It is a very sad story and one that Hastings tells very well.
Associated Press Staff
Vietnam by Max Hastings is masterful account of the war…Hastings’ narrative, along with Ken Burns’ masterful series on PBS, offers a well-balanced account of a war that ended more than four decades ago. The author weaves anecdotal and first-person accounts from both sides into the overall history to produce a compelling account that veterans of the war, those who felt its impact at home and readers born decades after the fighting ended will find hard to put down.
Tim O'Brien
This is a comprehensive, spellbinding, surprisingly intimate, and altogether magnificent historical narrative.
From the Publisher
We’ve seen a shelf-load of histories, analyses, memoirs, and novels on Vietnam. But what Hastings does in Vietnam is pull all these genres together in a highly readable and vivid narrative that, I think, will become the standard on the war for many years to come.” — NPR.org
“This is a comprehensive, spellbinding, surprisingly intimate, and altogether magnificent historical narrative.” — Tim O’Brien, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist The Things They Carried
“This balanced and insightful book is a pleasure to read. It destroys the fantasy that one side or the other held the moral high ground or a monopoly on devastating folly.” — Karl Marlantes, author of What It Is Like to Go to War and Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War
“A gripping, well-researched look at a divisive American war.” — New York Post
“A comprehensive and compelling narrative that illuminates political and military tactics and strategies — and the daily realities of a war that killed 2 million people.” — Pittsburgh Post Gazette
