In this comprehensive history, Stanley Karnow demystifies the tragic ordeal of America’s war in Vietnam. The book’s central theme is that America’s leaders, prompted as much by domestic politics as by global ambitions, carried the United States into Southeast Asia with little regard for the realities of the region. Karnow elucidates the decision-making process in Washington and Asia and recounts the political and military events that occurred after the Americans arrived in Vietnam. Throughout, he focuses on people, those who shaped strategy and those who suffered, died, or survived as a result.
Panoramic in scope and filled with fresh revelations drawn from secret documents and from exclusive interviews with hundreds of participants on both sides, Vietnam: A History transcends the past with lessons relevant to the present and the future.
Stanley Karnow was born in New York and graduated from Harvard in 1947. He began his journalistic career in Paris in 1950 as a Time correspondent. He covered Southeast Asia from 1959 until 1974 for Time, Life, the Saturday Evening Post, the London Observer, the Washington Post, and NBC News and was later an editor for the New Republic. He has written a number of books, including the bestselling Vietnam: A History and the Pulitzer Prize–winning In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines. He lives in Washington, DC.
Edward Holland is an audiobook narrator whose credits include Confessions of a Spy, Vietnam, and How to Read a Book.