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THE MAKING OF A QUAGMIRE

Name: THE MAKING OF A QUAGMIRE
Author: David Halberstam
ISBN: 0742560082

AMERICA AND VIETNAM DURING THE KENNEDY ERA

by David Halberstam & Daniel Joseph Singal ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1965

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This is a book about Vietnam, and for straight, readable reportage, it is beyond doubt the best so far: It is also a book about reporting, specifically the difficulties involved in reporting on so confusing and misunderstood a story as Vietnam has been for so long. Lastly , it is a book about the all-important lessons such a story holds for the American public and their policy makers. Mr. Halberstam, posted to Saigon by the New York Times at the age of 27 after brief but distinguished service in the first phases of the Congo crisis, stayed on through the coup which finally ousted the Ngo regime. His accounts of progress—rather, the lack of it—in the war against the Viet Cong, and of the incredible political scene, ran counter to our official line of "cautious optimism" and brought him a great deal of harsh criticism from high places as well as the Pulitzer prize. This more complete version of what he saw contains a splendid sense of the place and the people, as well as an invaluable explanation of the many basic, interlocking problems to be faced there. His chronicle ends before the emergence of General Khanh, but his verdict is in no sense outdated by subsequent developments. South Vietnam "may be worth a larger commitment on our part," he says, "but, if so, we should be told the truth, not spoon-fed cliches as in the past." Perspicacious, pertinent.

Pub Date: June 15, 1965

ISBN: 0742560082

Page Count: 252

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1965

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

- BOOK REVIEW
FILLED WITH FIRE AND LIGHT
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

- BOOK REVIEW
THE TALE OF A NIGGUN
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

- BOOK REVIEW
NIGHT
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.