Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam


Fredrik Logevall (Cornell University). Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (Random House, 2012).

“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.”
—Alan Brinkley, The New York Times Book Review

*Pulitzer Prize winner