A deeply humane dissection of McNamara’s tragic failures in Vietnam.
The blind hubris of waging war by the numbers.
Drawing on previously unknown notes, letters, and private diaries, journalist Philip Taubman and his brother, political scientist William Taubman, present a fresh look at the much-scrutinized life of Robert McNamara, architect of the Vietnam War. The secretary of defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, McNamara has been viewed by historians as a brilliant, driven man forever stained by his mismanagement of the war. This volume reexamines his motivations, loves, and rivalries. From his modest San Francisco childhood, with a distant father and a hovering mother, to his academic success, the authors explore what made the intensely competitive McNamara tick. At Harvard Business School, as new thinking about data as a management tool was taking shape, McNamara helped develop “managerial accounting.” The 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor changed his trajectory, and he was recruited to the U.S. Air Corps by officers seeking statistical controllers or “balance sheet warriors” to improve military management. McNamara’s success led to a postwar career at Ford Motor Company, constrained by antiquated practices. His brief corporate experience shaped McNamara’s outlook in the most notorious phase of his life, as he was invited to join the newly elected Kennedy administration on the brink of the Vietnam War. Private documents reveal the whirl of activity at the heart of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ social and political networks. McNamara’s loyalty to Johnson and passionate embrace of the Kennedy family, especially Jacqueline, exacerbated the deep despair he felt for the massive loss of life in Vietnam, the impossibility of winning the war, and his failure to push for withdrawal. Intense contradictions infuse his conversations and correspondence in this absorbing journalistic account. Extensive notes, bibliography, and photographs make for a nuanced, rich portrayal of a difficult man.
A deeply humane dissection of McNamara’s tragic failures in Vietnam.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781324007166
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
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. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
An engaging childhood memoir and a deeply affectionate tribute to the author’s parents.
The bestselling author recalls her childhood and her family’s wartime experiences.
Readers of Winspear’s popular Maisie Dobbs mystery series appreciate the London investigator’s canny resourcefulness and underlying humanity as she solves her many cases. Yet Dobbs had to overcome plenty of hardships in her ascent from her working-class roots. Part of the appeal of Winspear’s Dobbs series are the descriptions of London and the English countryside, featuring vividly drawn particulars that feel like they were written with firsthand knowledge of that era. In her first book of nonfiction, the author sheds light on the inspiration for Dobbs and her stories as she reflects on her upbringing during the 1950s and ’60s. She focuses much attention on her parents’ lives and their struggles supporting a family, as they chose to live far removed from their London pasts. “My parents left the bombsites and memories of wartime London for an openness they found in the country and on the land,” writes Winspear. As she recounts, each of her parents often had to work multiple jobs, which inspired the author’s own initiative, a trait she would apply to the Dobbs character. Her parents recalled grueling wartime experiences as well as stories of the severe battlefield injuries that left her grandfather shell-shocked. “My mother’s history,” she writes, “became my history—probably because I was young when she began telling me….Looking back, her stories—of war, of abuse at the hands of the people to whom she and her sisters had been billeted when evacuated from London, of seeing the dead following a bombing—were probably too graphic for a child. But I liked listening to them.” Winspear also draws distinctive portraits of postwar England, altogether different from the U.S., where she has since settled, and her unsettling struggles within the rigid British class system.
An engaging childhood memoir and a deeply affectionate tribute to the author’s parents.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64129-269-6
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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