Download or read book The Unquiet American written by Derek Chollet and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2011-11-08 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Holbrooke, who died in December 2010, was a pivotal player in U.S. diplomacy for more than forty years. Most recently special envoy for Iraq and Afghanistan under President Obama, Holbrooke also served as assistant secretary of state for both Asia and Europe, and as ambassador to both Germany and the United Nations. He had a key role in brokering a peace agreement among warring factions in Bosnia that led to the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995. Widely regarded to possess one of the most penetrating minds of any modern diplomat of any nation, Holbrooke was also well known for his outsized personality, and his capacity to charm and offend in equally colossal measures. In this book, the friends and colleagues who knew him best survey his accomplishments as a diplomat, activist, and author. Excerpts from Holbrooke's own writings further illuminate each significant period of his career. The Unquiet American is both a tribute to an exceptional public servant and a backstage history of the last half-century of American foreign policy.
Download or read book Edward Lansdale the Unquiet American written by Cecil B. Currey and published by Potomac Books. This book was released on 1998 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Village Voice called the complex life of U.S. Air Force major general and CIA agent Edward G. Lansdale one of "Technicolor fascination". The maverick military thinker's brilliant counterinsurgency tactics preserved democracy in the Philippines, but his subsequent efforts to create "a broad-based, open society" in Vietnam failed following his return to the United States in 1956. Lansdale later led an undercover organization dedicated to bringing down Fidel Castro. This important biography of the legendary intelligence operative and master of political and psychological warfare is now available as a Brassey's Five-Star Paperback.
Download or read book Unquiet Vietnam written by Gibson Square Books, Limited and published by Gibson Square. This book was released on 2022-07-06 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unquiet Vietnam retraces the ancient Vietnamese civilisation that has has been crushed by an avalanche of 21st century foreign investment following the violent mixture of French Colonialism and American imperialism. Visiting people such as the last remaining member of the Vietnamese imperial family, he becomes paints Indochina's twisted history as the military playground of empires--like the Middle East today--and uncovers an ancient culture struggling to remain alive as global forces pile in.
Download or read book Vietnam written by George Donelson Moss and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-01 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a comprehensive narrative history of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, from 1942 to 1975--with a concluding section that traces U.S.-Vietnam relations from the end of the war in 1975 to the present. Unlike most general histories of U.S. involvement in Vietnam--which are either conventional diplomatic or military histories--this volume synthesizes the perspectives to explore both dimensions of the struggle in greater depth, elucidating more of the complexities of the U.S.-Vietnam entanglement. It explains why Americans tried so hard for so long to stop the spread of Communism into Indochina, and why they failed. Key topics: The Fall of Saigon: The End as Prelude. Vietnam: A Place and A People. The Elephant and the Tiger. An Experiment in Nation Building. Raising the Stakes. Going to War. The Chain of Thunders. The Year of the Monkey. A War to End a War. The End of the Tunnel. Market: For anyone curious to know about the long American involvement in Southeast Asia, 1942-1975.
Download or read book Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars written by Mark Philip Bradley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-04-30 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making sense of the wars for Vietnam has had a long history. The question "why Vietnam?" dominated American and Vietnamese political life for much of the length of the wars and has continued to be asked in the decades since they ended. This volume brings together the work of eleven scholars to examine the conceptual and methodological shifts that have marked the contested terrain of Vietnam War scholarship. Editors Marilyn Young and Mark Bradley's superb group of renowned contributors spans the generations--including those who were active during wartime, along with scholars conducting research in Vietnamese sources and uncovering new sources in the United States, former Soviet Union, China, and Eastern and Western Europe. Ranging in format from top-down reconsiderations of critical decision-making moments in Washington, Hanoi, and Saigon, to microhistories of the war that explore its meanings from the bottom up, these essays comprise the most up-to-date collection of scholarship on the controversial historiography of the Vietnam Wars.
Download or read book The Unquiet Englishman A Life of Graham Greene written by Richard Greene and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Finalist for the 2022 Edgar Award A Washington Post Best Nonfiction Book of the Year A vivid, deeply researched account of the tumultuous life of one of the twentieth century’s greatest novelists, the author of The End of the Affair. One of the most celebrated British writers of his generation, Graham Greene’s own story was as strange and compelling as those he told of Pinkie the Mobster, Harry Lime, or the Whisky Priest. A journalist and MI6 officer, Greene sought out the inner narratives of war and politics across the world; he witnessed the Second World War, the Vietnam War, the Mau Mau Rebellion, the rise of Fidel Castro, and the guerrilla wars of Central America. His classic novels, including The Heart of the Matter and The Quiet American, are only pieces of a career that reads like a primer on the twentieth century itself. The Unquiet Englishman braids the narratives of Greene’s extraordinary life. It portrays a man who was traumatized as an adolescent and later suffered a mental illness that brought him to the point of suicide on several occasions; it tells the story of a restless traveler and unfailing advocate for human rights exploring troubled places around the world, a man who struggled to believe in God and yet found himself described as a great Catholic writer; it reveals a private life in which love almost always ended in ruin, alongside a larger story of politicians, battlefields, and spies. Above all, The Unquiet Englishman shows us a brilliant novelist mastering his craft. A work of wit, insight, and compassion, this new biography of Graham Greene, the first undertaken in a generation, responds to the many thousands of pages of letters that have recently come to light and to new memoirs by those who knew him best. It deals sensitively with questions of private life, sex, and mental illness, and sheds new light on one of the foremost modern writers.
Download or read book US Special Forces and Counterinsurgency in Vietnam written by Christopher K. Ives and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-01-24 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines US Army Special Forces efforts to mobilize and train indigenous minorities in Vietnam. Christopher K. Ives shows how before the Second Indochina War, the Republic of Vietnam had begun to falter under the burden of an increasingly successful insurgency. The dominant American military culture could not conform to President Kennedy’s guidance to wage 'small wars', while President Diem’s provincial and military structures provided neither assistance nor security. The Green Berets developed and executed effective counterinsurgency tactics and operations with strategic implications while living, training, and finally fighting with the Montagnard peoples in the Central Highlands. Special Forces soldiers developed and executed what needed to be done to mobilize indigenous minorities, having assessed what needed to be known. Combining Clausewitz, business theory and strategic insight, this book provides an important starting point for thinking about how the US military should be approaching the problems of today's ‘small wars’. US Special Forces and Counterinsurgency in Vietnam will be of much interest to students of the Vietnam War, Special Forces operations, military innovation and strategic theory in general.
Download or read book Vietnam written by Stanley Karnow and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1997-06-01 with total page 786 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A landmark work...The most complete account to date of the Vietnam tragedy." -The Washington Post Book World This monumental narrative clarifies, analyzes, and demystifies the tragic ordeal of the Vietnam war. Free of ideological bias, profound in its undertsanding, and compassionate in its human portrayls , it is filled with fresh revelations drawn from secret documents and from exclusive interviews with participants-French, American, Vietnamese, Chinese: diplomats, military commanders, high government officials, journalists, nurses, workers, and soldiers. Originally published a companion to the Emmy-winning PBS series, Karnow's defining book is a precursor to Ken Burns's ten-part forthcoming documentary series, The Vietnam War. Vietnam: A History puts events and decisions into such sharp focus that we come to understand - and make peace with - a convulsive epoch of our recent history. "This is history writing at its best." -Chicago Sun-Times "Even those of us who think we know something about it will read with fascination." -The New York Times
Download or read book America s Miracle Man in Vietnam written by Seth Jacobs and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-27 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam rethinks the motivations behind one of the most ruinous foreign-policy decisions of the postwar era: America’s commitment to preserve an independent South Vietnam under the premiership of Ngo Dinh Diem. The so-called Diem experiment is usually ascribed to U.S. anticommunism and an absence of other candidates for South Vietnam’s highest office. Challenging those explanations, Seth Jacobs utilizes religion and race as categories of analysis to argue that the alliance with Diem cannot be understood apart from America’s mid-century religious revival and policymakers’ perceptions of Asians. Jacobs contends that Diem’s Catholicism and the extent to which he violated American notions of “Oriental” passivity and moral laxity made him a more attractive ally to Washington than many non-Christian South Vietnamese with greater administrative experience and popular support. A diplomatic and cultural history, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam draws on government archives, presidential libraries, private papers, novels, newspapers, magazines, movies, and television and radio broadcasts. Jacobs shows in detail how, in the 1950s, U.S. policymakers conceived of Cold War anticommunism as a crusade in which Americans needed to combine with fellow Judeo-Christians against an adversary dangerous as much for its atheism as for its military might. He describes how racist assumptions that Asians were culturally unready for democratic self-government predisposed Americans to excuse Diem’s dictatorship as necessary in “the Orient.” By focusing attention on the role of American religious and racial ideologies, Jacobs makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of the disastrous commitment of the United States to “sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem.”
Download or read book Unquiet Vietnam written by Kenneth Murphy and published by Virago Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The state of Vietnam with its violent mixture of French colonialism, American imperialism and imperial traditions is examined here, as Murphy confronts his own history on a visit to Vietnam. He portrays the people he meets, from a US-educated Khmer to the last member of the imperial family.
Download or read book The Rising Tide of Color written by Moon-Ho Jung and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rising Tide of Color challenges familiar narratives of race in American history that all too often present the U.S. state as a benevolent force in struggles against white supremacy, especially in the South. Featuring a wide range of scholars specializing in American history and ethnic studies, this powerful collection of essays highlights historical moments and movements on the Pacific Coast and across the Pacific to reveal a different story of race and politics. From labor and anticolonial activists around World War I and multiracial campaigns by anarchists and communists in the 1930s to the policing of race and sexuality after World War II and transpacific movements against the Vietnam War, The Rising Tide of Color brings to light histories of race, state violence, and radical movements that continue to shape our world in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book A Companion to the Vietnam War written by Marilyn B. Young and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to the Vietnam War contains twenty-four definitive essays on America's longest and most divisive foreign conflict. It represents the best current scholarship on this controversial and influential episode in modern American history. Highlights issues of nationalism, culture, gender, and race. Covers the breadth of Vietnam War history, including American war policies, the Vietnamese perspective, the antiwar movement, and the American home front. Surveys and evaluates the best scholarship on every important era and topic. Includes a select bibliography to guide further research.
Download or read book Vietnam Geopolitical Affairs written by Tùng-Phong and published by Archway Publishing. This book was released on 2021-09-08 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1965, in the midst of the Vietnam War, Tùng-Phong reached out to the Vietnamese leaders in the North and South. He wanted to inform his contemporaries about the short-term needs of Vietnam as a whole and opine on long-term goals. The result was the book he published in October 1965: Chính- Vit-Nam or Vietnam Geopolitical Affairs. His daughter, Elizabeth T. Le, offers the first English translation of the landmark book in this text composed of three parts: Part one offers a history of Vietnam from the year 938, when Ngo-Quyen reclaimed An-Nam’s (then Vietnam) independence after one thousand years of Chinese domination. Part two contains what led to the general uprising, the revolt in the nineteenth century, communism, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam War (called the American War in Vietnam). Part three is the translation of her father’s book. What made her father’s book powerful is he explored where Vietnam stood on the world stage and the historical baggage it carried. Moreover, he sought to find out how Vietnam could propel itself forward for the sake of future generations.
Download or read book Vietnam written by David Chanoff and published by Tauris Parke Paperbacks. This book was released on 2009 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the view from the other side - the murderous trek down the Ho Chi Minh trail and life under American bombing.
Download or read book Vietnam s Lost Revolution written by Geoffrey C. Stewart and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-24 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vietnam's Lost Revolution employs archival material from Vietnam to examine the First Republic of Vietnam's Civic Action program, designed to recast the newly independent state as a modern, anticommunist nation. This book engages with topics like nationalism, post-colonialism, and development in its examination of events that led to the Vietnam War.
Download or read book Vietnam War 2 volumes written by James H. Willbanks and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-11-16 with total page 853 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This detailed two-volume set considers the Vietnam War, one of America's longest and bloodiest wars, from a topical perspective, addressing the main characters and key events of the war and supplying many relevant primary source documents. The Vietnam War not only claimed the lives of nearly 60,000 Americans and more than a million Vietnamese, but the prolonged conflict also resulted in a firestorm of protest at home that shook the foundations of the country and made U.S. citizens question the moral principles and motivations behind our foreign policy and military actions. Written in a very accessible style by recognized authorities on the war, Vietnam War: A Topical Exploration and Primary Source Collection provides students and general readers with a complete overview of the conflict in Vietnam—a broad topic that remains an important part of the American history and world history curriculum. Using a topical approach to cover all aspects of the war, the set enables students to see the complete picture of the conflict through its presentation of reference entries and documents arranged in cohesive, compelling chapters. Examples of the primary documents in the set include "Communist Party: Evaluation of the Tet Offensive" (1968) and President Richard Nixon's Speech on Vietnamization (1969). These primary sources are augmented by oral histories of soldiers who fought in the Tet Offensive. Additionally, maps and images in each section enhance the aesthetic appeal of the book and heighten students' understanding of the material. Readers will come away with both a strong comprehension of the Vietnam War as well as an appreciation for how significant this proxy conflict was as a lead-up event to the global Cold War.
Download or read book The Wars We Took to Vietnam written by Milton J. Bates and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What Americans refer to as the Vietnam War embraces much more than the conflict with North Vietnam. Milton J. Bates considers the other conflicts that Americans brought to that war: the divisions stemming from differences in race, class, sex, generation, and frontier ideology. In exploring the rich vein of writing and film that emerged from the Vietnam War era, he strikingly illuminates how these stories reflect American social crises of the period. Some material examined here is familiar, including the work of Michael Herr, Tim O'Brien, Philip Caputo, Susan Sontag, Francis Ford Coppola, and Oliver Stone. Other material is less well known—Neverlight by Donald Pfarrer and De Mojo Blues by A. R. Flowers, for example. Bates also draws upon an impressive range of secondary readings, from Freud and Marx to Geertz and Jameson. As the products of a culture in conflict, Vietnam memoirs, novels, films, plays, and poems embody a range of political perspectives, not only in their content but also in their structure and rhetoric. In his final chapter Bates outlines a "politico-poetics" of the war story as a genre. Here he gives special attention to our motives—from the deeply personal to the broadly cultural—for telling war stories.