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9781982555009

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Will appeal to more than military and political history lovers; it may become one of the standard accounts of the war. -- Library Journal (starred review) 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, New York Times bestselling author This is a comprehensive, spellbinding, surprisingly intimate, and altogether magnificent historical narrative. -- Tim O'Brien, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist The Things They Carried [Hastings] brings his usual brilliant descriptive skills to the action, mixing individual anecdotes with big-picture considerations...Superb...A definitive history, gripping from start to finish but relentlessly disturbing. -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) 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. -- General David Petraeus (US Army, Ret.), Chairman, KKR Global Institute, and former commander of coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, commander of US Central Command, and director of the CIA. 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. -- Mark Clodfelter, National War College professor and author of The Limits of Air Power: The American Bombing of North Vietnam

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. -- Mark Clodfelter, National War College professor and author of The Limits of Air Power: The American Bombing of North Vietnam 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. -- General David Petraeus (US Army, Ret.), Chairman, KKR Global Institute, and former commander of coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, commander of US Central Command, and director of the CIA. [Hastings] brings his usual brilliant descriptive skills to the action, mixing individual anecdotes with big-picture considerations...Superb...A definitive history, gripping from start to finish but relentlessly disturbing. -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) 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, New York Times bestselling author Will appeal to more than military and political history lovers; it may become one of the standard accounts of the war. -- Library Journal (starred review)

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Sir Max Hastings chronicles Vietnam with the benefit of vivid personal memories: first of reporting in 1967-68 from the United States, where he encountered many of the war's decision-makers including President Lyndon Johnson, then of successive assignments in Indochina for newspapers and BBC TV: he rode a helicopter out of the US Saigon embassy compound during the 1975 final evacuation. He is the author of twenty-six books, most about conflict, and between 1986 and 2002 served as editor-in-chief of the Daily Telegraph, then editor of the Evening Standard. He has won many prizes both for journalism and his books, of which the most recent are All Hell Let Loose, Catastrophe and The Secret War, best-sellers translated around the world. He has two grown-up children, Charlotte and Harry, and lives with his wife Penny in West Berkshire, where they garden enthusiastically. Peter Noble, an Earphones Award-winning narrator, grew up in South Africa and studied drama and music at the University of Cape Town. He has worked extensively as an actor, touring South Africa with a small repertory theater company, as well as working on radio, TV, and film.

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