American Reckoning
The Vietnam War and Our National Identity

As usual on a Sunday, I started the day at Peets, the cafe in my San Francisco neighborhood. I'd brought along American Reckoning; it seemed like the morning to finish a book I've been reading on and off for a couple months - and I finished with something like a deep inward groan, a sense of sadness......more

His basic premise seems to have been taken directly from a poorly-reasoned paper he himself would hopefully have graded accordingly in his capacity as a university professor: Appy has accepted the rhetoric he simultaneously rejects concerning "American exceptionalism." The whole book is like this. H......more

American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity by Christian G. Appy The introduction asks us to examine our history, especially the military history, and specifically Vietnam. What have we learned from this dreadful experience? How has this history caused us to rethink ourselves and ou......more

Definitely written with a liberal slant but is still a mountain of information about the level of government deception and the atrocities inflicted by the American side. What is striking is how compliant the media was in the early phases of the conflict as they chose not to probe the deeper issues......more

4.5 stars--This eye-opening book reminds us that many of the aggressive cultural divides in the U.S. we see today originated during the Vietnam War; indeed, the deep-dive history lesson is worth the price of admission alone. It’s easy to look at social media and the emboldened racist element and thi......more