A retired CIA officer describes his considerable involvement in the Vietnam War and offers a somewhat self-serving account of the failure of American policy.
Allen compares himself to Cassandra, and, if his claims here (vetted by the CIA) are even partially true, the comparison is apt. Not long after the 1954 fall of Dien Bien Phu, Allen (and some unnamed colleagues who agreed with him) began offering to military commanders and politicians and diplomatic officers what they considered realistic assessments of the political and military situation in Vietnam, but no one believed them—or even wanted to hear their generally dark predictions. The author begins with a little personal history. Born in 1926, he saw action in the South Pacific during WWII. Afterwards, he joined the new Central Intelligence Agency and became a specialist in Indochinese affairs. He witnessed the increasing Vietnamese involvement of the US in the early 1950s and credits himself with predicting the assault on Dien Bien Phu (no one listened); he warned his superiors in 1954 that the US should not get involved in Vietnam (no one listened); and he saw the Tet Offensive coming (no one listened). During the 1950s and ’60s he was continually in and out of Vietnam—and, at one point, spent two years separated from his family. He believes that one of our principal failures was permitting the communists to win the ideological and psychological battles with the Vietnamese. He describes a chaotic situation during the 1960s and ’70s: There was, he says, no coordinated, integrated plan of intelligence among the military, the CIA, and the South Vietnamese—but there was an insatiable hunger for good news from those US leaders prosecuting the conflict, so the naysayers like Allen were gradually marginalized. Allen is no prose stylist: in his hackneyed text, burrs are under saddles, babies are thrown out with bathwater, and feet are held to the fire.
Plodding and pedantic—but with poignant reminders that the tragedy of Vietnam need not have happened. (3 maps, not seen)Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2001
ISBN: 1-56663-387-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
Did you like this book?
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.
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
Did you like this book?
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
Did you like this book?
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
