1945 - Present Books - Page 5

Madam Secretary: A Memoir

Madeleine K. Albright, Bill Woodward

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Total reviews: 62 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Madeleine Albright is one of the most deeply admired women of our time, and the first female in our nation's history to achieve the title Secretary of State. For eight years during the first and second Clinton terms, she was privy to some of the most fascinating and controversial episodes in memory. Now, in this outspoken memoir, Madeleine Albright shares her personal story, and provides an insider's look into the White House and world affairs during an era of unprecedented change. From a difficult start as a political refugee from Czechoslovakia, Albright went on to become a tireless advocate of civil and women's rights, and pursued a life in politics that ultimately landed her in the upper stratosphere of diplomacy and policy-making in her adopted country. Refreshingly candid, Madam Secretary brings to life the world leaders Albright worked with intimately in her years of service, and the battles she fought to prove her worth in a male-dominated arena. We also get to know Albright, the private woman: her life raising three daughters, the painful breakup of her marriage, and the discovery late in life of her own Jewish background and that her grandparents had died in concentration

Vietnam: A History

Stanley Karnow

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 61 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

poorly researched and providing little insight into the war 1 out of 5 stars.
10 of 13 people found this review helpful.

This book has given an authority that its contents and research in no way deserves. A more appopriate title would be "Vietnam: An American mythology" because facts be damned, Karnow is dedicated to telling the story he wants to tell.

The first thing to understand is that the majority of this book does not concern itself with America's "vietnam war" in terms of the large conventional conflict between 1965 and 1975. Karnow spends the first 426 pages leading up to 1965. What should be background in some sense consumes the book. And in terms of the book, the historical subjects are where Karnow's knowledge is worst. As an example, Karnow describes Chinese, Roman and 19th century french methods of rule as essentially the same system. He fails to grasp that Vietnam was under chinese rule for the majority of its history and that "nationalism" was the exception rather than the rule.

His coverage of Ho Chi Minh essentially is the propoganda view of the man himself. Karnow is incapable of looking beyond it or doing original research on his subject. He gets the facts of what happened in 1945 completely wrong. He buy's into Ho's propoganda that the Ho led a popular "revolution" against the Japanese. In reality, the surrendering Japanese in 1945 handed over power to a variety of local groups with the goal of causing the allies trouble. Contrary to Karnow's poor research, there was no revolution in 1945 and there was no Viet Minh "government" except on paper. The Viet Minh were so weak that they were pushed aside by the local french within a few weeks without even support from the outside.

Karnow disposes of the French war in Vietnam in around 30 pages. Following the mythology script, he focuses most of his attention on Dien Bien Phu and ignores the complexity and details of the French phase. Its a superficial account at best.

The Eisenhower and Kennedy chapters on Diem show off Karnow's basic ignorance of the situation in Vietnam at that time. Rather than being about Vietnam, its more like Vietnam as seen by Washington in those years. There is no attempt at understanding the actual politics of the Diem era. The information on North Vietnam (or as Karnow strangely refers to them "the communists") is completely lacking. The internal politics of North Vietnam are ignored as much as possible.

As an example of Karnow's strange views: "In May 1959, the North Vietnamese leadership created a unit called Group 559, its task to begin enlarging the tradtional communist infiltration route, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, into the south." Group 559 in reality launched an invasion of Laos putting a large part of the territory of that counry under Vietnamese rule which continues on even now. Karnow's notion of a "traditional infiltration route" is completely false. North Vietnam invaded Laos to flank the border of south vietnam and to use occupied Laos as a base for attacking Vietnam.

As the book goes on, Karnow presents the traditional mythology about peaceful neutral cambodia. What he fails to say is that Sihanouk was a dictator who murdered his opponents and kept power by alternately allying himself with the left and the right. He also fails to mention the well-known fact that rather than being neutral, Sihanouk (and cambodia) had signed a deal with China were their rice crop would be bought at an inflated price in exchange for opening cambodian ports to arms shipments and allowing Vietnamese bases on cambodian soil. The so-called "neutrality" story that Karnow repeats is nonsense.

The last couple of hundred pages that cover the war itself give a mixed up account that does a disservice to both the military and political history of the war. He doesn't understand how the war was fought in Vietnam, he doesn't understand the politics of any of the players and he is deeply attached to the mythology that vietnam was a "gureilla war" fought against a local insurgency. He doesn't pick up on the fact that Vietnam was largely a conventional war fought between large units with no front lines. Entire divisions of north vietnam came south to fight american divisions in the field. The counterinsurgency mythology of vietnam on the part of Karnow and many others is in no small part due to the fact that reporters were stationed in Saigon and did day-trips out to counterinsurgency operations in the Saigon area.

And Karnow gets how the war ended completely wrong. The war ended because the entire North Vietnamese army launched a conventional military invasion with tanks over the border. In the end, the "invincible" insurgency in the countryside couldn't win anything.

Karnow is also useless in terms of the legacy of the war. The book ends with the North Vietnamese celebrating their victory in Saigon. He doesn't cover the disaster of the postwar era. He doesn't cover the irony of "Imperial" Vietnam turning Laos and Cambodia into colonies within a few years of the war except to note it as minimally as he can. While we get hundreds of pages of history on the front end of the war, North Vietnam marching into Saigon is the end of history.

In summary this is a bad book. It spends way too many pages on the wrong subjects, suffers from a lack of research, depends too much on anicdotal views of history and presents an utterly misleading version of the war.

For those who want a complete (but very dry) accurate military history of the conflict, I suggest "The Rise and Fall of an American Army by Shelby Stanton." For those interested in the complete story of Cambodia, I would suggest the first half of Pol Pot Anatomy of a Nightmare by Philip Short.

Stanley Karnow is an appaulingly bad historian and I keep hoping for a more accurate generalist history of the war to eclipse this book. But there still is nothing out there.

Editorial Review:

This Pulitzer Prize-winning account of one of this century's most controversial wars is filled with revelations drawn from secret documents and from exclusive interviews with hundreds of participants on both sides. The central theme of the book is that America's leaders, prompted as much by domestic politics as by global ambitions, carried the United States into South-east Asia with little regard for the realities of the region. The chain of events that led to the deployment of thousands of American troops has been set into its deeper historical context - especially the growth of Vietnamese nationalism over two millennia.

Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

Robert F. Kennedy

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Total reviews: 37 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

AS WE APPROACH IN HALF A YEAR THE FORTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS FBI ASSASSINATION LET US RECALL WHEN WISDOM AND DIPLOMACY RULED 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Here we have in Robert Kennedy's own account how the world kept out of annihilating nuclear warfare nearly a half century ago, rather than the current highly profitable rushes to war with untold, uncounted millions of innocent victims these past few decades.

Here we can read how true, wise, competent and democratically elected national leaders kept us out of war, Averting 'The Final Failure': John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (Stanford Nuclear Age Series).

The only lamentable sectio of this chronicle may be, as ever, Schlesinger's introduction. The rest let us read and pray once more for leaders of peace and morality, not of corrupt as profitable war-mongering.

There are several accounts of those thirteen days, and films. Let us best begin with this book.

Editorial Review:

The unique, gripping account of the perilous showdown between the United States and the Soviet Union. During the thirteen days in October 1962 when the United States confronted the Soviet Union over its installation of missiles in Cuba, few people shared the behind-the-scenes story as it is told here by the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy. In a clear and simple record, he describes the personalities involved in the crisis, with particular attention to the actions and attitudes of his brother, President John F. Kennedy. He describes the daily, even hourly, exchanges between Russian representatives and American. In firsthand immediacy we see the frightening responsibility of two great nations holding the fate of the world in their hands.

Witness

Whittaker Chambers

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Total reviews: 61 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Haunting 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

Witness is among the most haunting books that I have ever read. The reader who picks it up expecting only a combination spy story and courtroom drama is likely to be as profoundly surprised as was I.

I had somewhat absent-mindedly placed Witness on my birthday gift list, in deference to the frequency with which it is cited as one of the indispensable political books of the 20th century. Upon receipt, I assigned it to the "to-read" stack, failing to note that it was a daunting 800 pages long. Shortly after I began it and realized its length, I feared it would prove too dense for me to enjoy. How wrong I was: when I at last closed the book a couple of weeks later, I knew that it would haunt me, possibly for all the years I have left.

Many conservatives regard this book as a seminal founding charter, a characterization that not only underrates its literary quality, but which also erects a needless barrier before others who would appreciate it. This book is must-reading, regardless of political persuasion. I myself differ from Chambers in several fundamental ways: I am as predisposed to optimism as he was to pessimism; I relished elementary school as greatly as he was tormented by it; and I do not share his religious faith. But these and other differences do not inhibit a reader from appreciating this magnificent book.

This book not only tells a riveting story, it does so with a poetic, melancholy beauty reminiscent of a great Russian novelist. Something about his writing reminded me of Nabokov (an inexact comparison, given that the style exhibits none of Nabokov's exuberant, puckish wordplay). But Chambers's fluid, graceful sentences, and his gift for reconstruction of sensory and emotional states, are comparable to those of the brilliant Russian emigre. Suffice it so say that this book does not read like a bestselling memoir, but rather as a great work of literature.

The story of Witness is of a man originally alienated from his society, and of his struggle to find good and meaning in his world. Chambers's account of his early life is deeply saddening. One suspects that the entire family was genetically predisposed to depression, considering his brother's suicide, the narrator's own similar attempts, and his parents' many self-destructive actions.

Attending school only accentuated young Vivian's (later Whittaker's) sense of isolation. One story he relates is hard to forget: on one of his first school days, he witnessed three boys urinating on a lollipop, and then tricking a later-arriving fourth boy into putting it into his mouth. (The incident itself is gloomy enough; equally so is the fact that Chambers later remembered it as emblematic of his school experience.) Young Chambers is traumatized by the pervasive cruelty around him. He struggles through the ordeal of school - the mockery of his name Vivian, the taunts of being a "sissy," and being compelled to fight.

One is hardly surprised that such an alienated, secretly intelligent, unappreciated youth, convinced of the intractable injustice of the world, would be seduced by communism. In the central section of the book, Chambers details his gradual descent into that world, first as an open party communist, later as a practitioner in espionage. It is in this section that he meets Alger Hiss, and collaborates with him in betraying his country.

This middle section of the book is probably the most arduous reading. At points, many of the figures and spy escapades seem to all run together. But stick with it, because the final 300 pages or so, detailing the Hiss case, are among the most gripping you will ever read.

Chambers at some point realizes that the actions and amorality of communist agitation offend his still-living conscience. He finally responds to that conscience, and begins a further personal journey to where he locates the spiritual comfort he previously lacked: in truth, in family, in working the land, and in religious faith.

Ultimately, Chambers's break with the party compels him to inform on Alger Hiss and others during a Congressional investigation of communist infiltration of the executive branch. Chambers chooses his title of "Witness" advisedly, meaning "witness" in quite the literal, religious sense - a moral compulsion to testify to what he knows, in spite of the danger to himself, in order to help save the world around him. Indeed, Chambers is convinced that he is defecting from the winning to the losing side when he makes his break, but feels he cannot rightly do otherwise.

Popular memory of this period in American history has been, unfortunately, blurred by the excesses of Joe McCarthy. McCarthy's crude and reckless actions have made him a convenient whipping boy for subsequent Hollywood treatments of the Cold War. It is too little remembered that prior to the McCarthy debacle, it was revealed that in fact, there were many communists who had ensconced themselves in the highest levels of the American government, where they practiced a treasonous espionage. The Chambers-Hiss case, much more than the buffoonery of McCarthy, is the truly dramatic and relevant parable of the age.

Much of the final chapters of Witness is told through transcripts of the Congressional hearings. Reading them, one can only wish for a skilled Hollywood treatment of these scenes. The events included every dramatic turn one could hope for - the steady unraveling of a senior State Department official as his lies are exposed on the witness stand, the relentless and skilled probing of Congressional investigators, dramatic personal confrontations, the discovery of critical evidence midway through the proceedings, and even the secreting of classified material in a hollowed-out pumpkin.

What is sobering to realize is that the case would be likely to play out in much the same way today: the press reflexively sided with the urbane, politically-approved Hiss, while the slovenly, seemingly-shady Chambers was subjected to every calumny imaginable. But it turned out that it was the schlub who was actually the man of intelligence and integrity. Appearances are often deceiving.

One thing that leaps out from these pages after the fact is just how pathetically incompetent a liar was Alger Hiss. You follow him weaving and revising and hedging, and not very convincingly. But so blinding were the ascendant political assumptions of the time that he was the one who was initially believed.

One needn't share Chambers's views on politics, religion, or even of the mind of the typical communist subversive, to find his memoir to be a story of surpassing poetry and haunting resonance. Few people have had such an important story to tell in their memoirs, and almost none have told them so lyrically. Few are the books that are virtually impossible to forget. This is one.

Editorial Review:

"Whittaker Chambers has written one of the really significant American autobiographies...penetrating and terrible insights into America in the early twentieth century." --Arthur Schlesingr, Jr.

Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full

Conrad Black

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Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The acclaimed biographer of Franklin Delano Roosevelt takes on Richard Nixon in the first full biography in a generation, bringing a unique perspective to the life and politics of one of America's most controversial public figures.

From the late 1940s to the mid-1970s, Richard Nixon was a polarizing figure in American politics, admired for his intelligence, savvy, and strategic skill, and reviled for his shady manner and cutthroat tactics. Conrad Black, whose epic biography of FDR was widely acclaimed as a masterpiece, now separates the good in Nixon--his foreign initiatives, some of his domestic policies, and his firm political hand--from the sinister, in a book likely to generate enormous attention and controversy.

Black believes the hounding of Nixon from office was partly political retribution from a lifetime's worth of enemies and Nixon's misplaced loyalty to unworthy subordinates, and not clearly the consequence of crimes in which he participated. Conrad Black's own recent legal travails, though hardly comparable, have undoubtedly given him an unusual insight into the pressures faced by Nixon in his last two years as president and the first few years of his retirement.

Make Gentle the Life of This World: The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy

Robert F. Kennedy

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 32 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Weep, yes, but then be inspired 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

For those who missed the time in which those now called "Reagan Democrats" and those opposed to the ongoing war in Vietnam were inspired by the same voice, especially who cannot even begin to imagine how that could be, this small book is a must-read that will enable you to experience what is possible through inspiring [rather than angry divisive cynical] leadership.

Some quotes from the book, which seems as if it could have been written this morning:

"An understanding of what America really stands for is going to count far more than missiles, aircraft carriers, and supersonic bombers."

"Insurgency aims not at the conquest of territory but at the allegiance of man. ... Counterinsurgency might best be described as social reform under pressure...any effort that becomes pre-occupied with gadgets and techniques and force is doomed to failure."

"Thus does false principle destroy the credibility of our wisdom and purpose that is the true foundation of influence as a world power."

"America was a great force in the world, with immense prestige, long before we became a great military power. That power has come to us and we cannot renounce it, but neither can we afford to forget that the real constructive force in the world comes not from bombs but from imaginative ideas, warm sympathies, and a generous spirit.
These are qualities that cannot be manufactured by specialists in public relations.
They are the natural qualities of a people pursuing decency and human dignity in its own undertakings without arrogance or hostility or delusions of superiority toward others, a people whose ideals for others are firmly rooted in the realities of the society we have build for itself."

"Whatever the costs to us, let us think of the young men we have sent there: not just the killed, but those who have to kill; not just the maimed, but those who must look upon the results of what they do."

[AND, to remind us not to sink into frustrated despair at our current mean-spirited divisive administration, RFK's words spoken in courage during the dark days of Apartheid in South Africa:]
"Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."

"Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of those acts will be written the history of this generation."

Editorial Review:

From the private journals of Robert F. Kennedy come words that spark the imagination and touch the heart, accompanied by photos of both the public and private Kennedy. The late senator’s son, Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, opens his father’s journals to offer the quintessence of his thought. Photographs throughout.

A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts

Andrew Chaikin

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Total reviews: 118 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Perfect Mix of Technical and Entertainment!!! 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I recently took my four year old son to KSC to see the launch of Discovery on its STS-124 mission. While I have always been one to make sure I have the TV on during a launch, I never dove much deeper than the average newspaper coverage. However, after taking the tours at KSC, a fire was ignited.
This book was the perfect fit for me. It covers every apollo mission without losing interest in the later missions. Obviously more time is spent covering Apollo's 1, 11, & 13.
Chaikin introduces the readers to many of the astronauts that while are not as well known as Armstrong, contibuted just as much, if not more to the program.
As it states in the description, the series,From the Earth to the Moon closely follows the book, but puts a more personal touch on the program while still providing enough information for the book to be used as reference for high school papers or a college thesis. It is the perfect mix of technical and entertainment. A Great Read!!

Editorial Review:

This acclaimed portrait of heroism and ingenuity captures a watershed moment in human history. The astronauts themselves have called it the definitive account of their missions. On the night of July 20, 1969, our world changed forever when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. Based on in-depth interviews with twenty-three of the twenty-four moon voyagers, as well as those who struggled to get the program moving, A Man on the Moon conveys every aspect of the Apollo missions with breathtaking immediacy and stunning detail.

Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

Timothy B. Tyson

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Total reviews: 40 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

“Daddy and Roger and ’em shot ’em a nigger.” Those words, whispered to ten-year-old Tim Tyson by a playmate, heralded a ?restorm that would forever transform the tobacco market town of Oxford, North Carolina.

On May 11, 1970, Henry Marrow, a twenty-three-year-old black veteran, walked into a crossroads store owned by Robert Teel and came out running. Teel and two of his sons chased and beat Marrow, then killed him in public as he pleaded for his life.

Like many small Southern towns, Oxford had barely been touched by the civil rights movement. But in the wake of the killing, young African Americans took to the streets. While lawyers battled in the courthouse, the Klan raged in the shadows and black Vietnam veterans torched the town’s tobacco warehouses. Tyson’s father, the pastor of Oxford’s all-white Methodist church, urged the town to come to terms with its bloody racial history. In the end, however, the Tyson family was forced to move away.

Tim Tyson’s riveting narrative of that fiery summer brings gritty blues truth, soaring gospel vision, and down-home humor to a shocking episode of our history. Like To Kill a Mockingbird, Blood Done Sign My Name is a classic portrait of an unforgettable time and place.

Means of Ascent (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 2)

Robert A. Caro

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Total reviews: 79 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Robert A. Caro's life of Lyndon Johnson, which began with the greatly acclaimed The Path to Power, also winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, continues -- one of the richest, most intensive and most revealing examinations ever undertaken of an American President. In Means of Ascent the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer/historian, chronicler also of Robert Moses in The Power Broker, carries Johnson through his service in World War II and the foundation of his long-concealed fortune and the facts behind the myths he created about it. But the explosive heart of the book is Caro's revelation of the true story of the fiercely contested 1948 senatorial election, for forty years shrouded in rumor, which Johnson had to win or face certain political death, and which he did win -- by "the 87 votes that changed history." Caro makes us witness to a momentous turning point in American politics: the tragic last stand of the old politics versus the new -- the politics of issue versus the politics of image, mass manipulation, money and electronic dazzle.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less

Terry Ryan

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Total reviews: 123 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

As good as I thought it would be 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I first heard of this book on the Today Show. Then I happened to run across the movie on HBO. It is a good quick read.

Interesting to think what could have been 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I thought this was a wonderful book that came to my attention only after the author had died. The story revolves around a family of 10 kids, an alcoholic father and how the mother (sporadically) supports them by winning contests and jingles she (Evelyn) has written.

While the story wouldn't hold up in this century - I thought it was a great slice of life of the 50's. Evelyn's journals and contest entrys are well preserved and entertaining to read. She must have kept everything!

Underneath all the entrys and journals is a smart woman. She knows the power of the written word and also hooks up with a group a ladies that also enter such contests. These women are smart as whips - yet somewhat stymied by their roles in life - housewives. Contesting offers them a way to challenge their wits and writing.

The father is a somewhat disappointing character - but somehow he even redeems himself, but you have to read the book to find out how!

Editorial Review:

The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio introduces Evelyn Ryan, an enterprising woman who kept poverty at bay with wit, poetry, and perfect prose during the "contest era" of the 1950s and 1960s. Standing up to the church, her alcoholic husband, and antiquated ideas about women, Evelyn turned every financial challenge into an opportunity for innovation, all the while raising her six sons and four daughters with the belief that miracles are an everyday occurrence. The inspiration for a major motion picture, Evelyn Ryan's story is told by her daughter Terry with an infectious joy that shows how a winning spirit and sense of humor can triumph over adversity every time.