Vietnam, Max Hastings
Vietnam, Max Hastings
19 Rating(s)
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Vietnam
An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975

Author: Max Hastings

Narrator: Max Hastings, Peter Noble

Unabridged: 33 hr 33 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 10/16/2018


Synopsis

An absorbing and definitive modern history of the Vietnam War from the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of The Secret War.Vietnam became the Western world’s most divisive modern conflict, precipitating a battlefield humiliation for France in 1954, then a vastly greater one for the United States in 1975. Max Hastings has spent the past three years interviewing scores of participants on both sides, as well as researching a multitude of American and Vietnamese documents and memoirs, to create an epic narrative of an epic struggle. He portrays the set pieces of Dienbienphu, the 1968 Tet offensive, the air blitz of North Vietnam, and also much less familiar miniatures such as the bloodbath at Daido, where a US Marine battalion was almost wiped out, together with extraordinary recollections of Ho Chi Minh’s warriors. Here are the vivid realities of strife amid jungle and paddies that killed two million people.Many writers treat the war as a US tragedy, yet Hastings sees it as overwhelmingly that of the Vietnamese people, of whom forty died for every American. US blunders and atrocities were matched by those committed by their enemies. While all the world has seen the image of a screaming, naked girl seared by napalm, it forgets countless eviscerations, beheadings, and murders carried out by the communists. The people of both former Vietnams paid a bitter price for the Northerners’ victory in privation and oppression. Here is testimony from Vietcong guerrillas, Southern paratroopers, Saigon bargirls, and Hanoi students alongside that of infantrymen from South Dakota, Marines from North Carolina, and Huey pilots from Arkansas.No past volume has blended a political and military narrative of the entire conflict with heart-stopping personal experiences, in the fashion that Max Hastings’ readers know so well. The author suggests that neither side deserved to win this struggle with so many lessons for the twenty-first century about the misuse of military might to confront intractable political and cultural challenges. He marshals testimony from warlords and peasants, statesmen and soldiers, to create an extraordinary record.

About Max Hastings

Max Hastings is the author of twenty-eight books, most about conflict, and between 1986 and 2002 served as editor in chief of the Daily Telegraph, then as editor of the Evening Standard. He has won many prizes, for both his journalism and his books, the most recent of which are the bestsellers Vietnam, The Secret War, Catastrophe, and All Hell Let Loose. Knighted in 2002, Hastings is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of King’s College London, and a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He has two grown children, Charlotte and Harry, and lives with his wife, Penny, in West Berkshire, where they garden enthusiastically.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Brett on December 11, 2024

This was an incredible undertaking. In my opinion, Max Hastings never wrote a bad history book, this one included. This was a full-scale history of Western involvement in Vietnam including both the French and the Americans. The history of colonial French Indochina and the reduction of foreign power......more

Goodreads review by Anthony on January 10, 2025

Ultimate Disaster. The Vietnam War is viewed in Western terms as synonymous with disaster. A complete failure on the American side as it got bogged down in a hugely unpopular and costly war. It shook the invincibility and confidence of the nation in the same way that the Invasion of Iraq did some 30......more

Goodreads review by Titus on May 31, 2019

The only reason to read popular books about history for which there are plenty of academic studies around is to learn something about how to tell an interesting story. Hastings is a well-known war writer and as expected, can spin a narrative that is mostly interesting and flows well. He gives fair w......more

Goodreads review by Tim on February 23, 2022

This is just the 3rd Vietnam war book I’ve read, after Vietnam: A History by Stanley Karnow, and The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam. It offered some new things and was well worth the read. This book spends much time “on the ground”, describing what it was like during the battles, or the d......more

Goodreads review by Christopher on January 12, 2023

Max Hastings' Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy is one of the best one-volume syntheses of Vietnam War scholarship for a general audience. Hastings, who covered the war as a correspondent, is clear-eyed to the point of being utterly cynical about the war and the mythology that's been built up about it, on al......more