Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam - Softcover

Logevall, Fredrik

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375756477 ISBN 13: 9780375756474

Publisher: Presidio Press, 2014

Synopsis

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE

The struggle for Vietnam occupies a central place in the history of the twentieth century. Fought over a period of three decades, the conflict drew in all the world’s powers and saw two of them—first France, then the United States—attempt to subdue the revolutionary Vietnamese forces. For France, the defeat marked the effective end of her colonial empire, while for America the war left a gaping wound in the body politic that remains open to this day.
 
How did it happen? Tapping into newly accessible diplomatic archives in several nations and making full use of the published literature, distinguished scholar Fredrik Logevall traces the path that led two Western nations to lose their way in Vietnam. Embers of War opens in 1919 at the Versailles Peace Conference, where a young Ho Chi Minh tries to deliver a petition for Vietnamese independence to President Woodrow Wilson. It concludes in 1959, with a Viet Cong ambush on an outpost outside Saigon and the deaths of two American officers whose names would be the first to be carved into the black granite of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In between come years of political, military, and diplomatic maneuvering and miscalculation, as leaders on all sides embark on a series of stumbles that makes an eminently avoidable struggle a bloody and interminable reality.
 
Logevall takes us inside the councils of war—and gives us a seat at the conference tables where peace talks founder. He brings to life the bloodiest battles of France’s final years in Indochina—and shows how from an early point, a succession of American leaders made disastrous policy choices that put America on its own collision course with history: Harry Truman’s fateful decision to reverse Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s policy and acknowledge France’s right to return to Indochina after World War II; Dwight Eisenhower’s strenuous efforts to keep Paris in the fight and his escalation of U.S. involvement in the aftermath of the humiliating French defeat at Dien Bien Phu; and the curious turnaround in Senator John F. Kennedy’s thinking that would lead him as president to expand that commitment, despite his publicly stated misgivings about Western intervention in Southeast Asia.
 
An epic story of wasted opportunities and tragic miscalculations, featuring an extraordinary cast of larger-than-life characters, Embers of War delves deep into the historical record to provide hard answers to the unanswered questions surrounding the demise of one Western power in Vietnam and the arrival of another. This book will become the definitive chronicle of the struggle’s origins for years to come.

WINNER OF THE FRANCIS PARKMAN PRIZE · NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR · A GLOBE AND MAIL “BEST READS” SELECTION · LONGLISTED FOR THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE
 
“This extraordinary work of modern history combines powerful narrative thrust, deep scholarly authority, and quiet interpretive confidence.”—Francis Parkman Prize citation
 
“A balanced, deeply researched history of how, as French colonial rule faltered, a succession of American leaders moved step by step down a road toward full-blown war.”—Pulitzer Prize citation

“A monumental history . . . a widely researched and eloquently written account of how the U.S. came to be involved in Vietnam . . . certainly the most comprehensive review of this period to date.”—The Wall Street Journal
From the Hardcover edition.

About this title

Review

A balanced, deeply researched history of how, as French colonial rule faltered, a succession of American leaders moved step by step down a road toward full-blown war. Source: Pulitzer Prize citation

A monumental history . . . a widely researched and eloquently written account of how the U.S. came to be involved in Vietnam . . . certainly the most comprehensive review of this period to date. Source: Wall Street Journal

Fredrik Logevall's excellent book "Choosing War "(1999) chronicled the American escalation of the Vietnam War in the early 1960s. With "Embers of "War, he has written an even more impressive book about the French conflict in Vietnam and the beginning of the American one. . . . It is the most comprehensive history of that time. Logevall, a professor of history at Cornell University, has drawn from many years of previous scholarship as well as his own. And he has produced a powerful portrait of the terrible and futile French war from which Americans learned little as they moved toward their own engagement in Vietnam. Source: The New York Times Book Review-Editor's Choice

This is an excellent study of this crucial period in post-war history, and a compelling account both of the French struggle in Vietnam and the way in which the United States was dragged into a war she couldn't really win. Source: History of War 03/08/2015

"Embers of War", a remarkable new history of the first Vietnamese war by Fredrik Logevall Source: The Economist

From the Publisher

Fredrik Logevall is John S. Knight Professor of International Studies and Professor of History at Cornell University.

Edition details

• Publisher: Presidio Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0375756477
• ISBN 13: 9780375756474
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 864