Vietnam

“This balanced and insightful book is a pleasure to read. It destroys the fantasy that one side or the other held the moral high ground or a monopoly on devastating folly.” - Karl Marlantes, author of What It Is Like to Go to War and Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War“This is a comprehensive, spellbinding, surprisingly intimate, and altogether magnificent historical narrative.” - Tim O’Brien, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist The Things They Carried“We’ve seen a shelf-load of histories, analyses, memoirs, and novels on Vietnam. But what Hastings does in Vietnam is pull all these genres together in a highly readable and vivid narrative that, I think, will become the standard on the war for many years to come.” - NPR.org“A comprehensive and compelling narrative that illuminates political and military tactics and strategies – and the daily realities of a war that killed 2 million people.” - Pittsburgh Post Gazette”[Hastings] brings his usual brilliant descriptive skills to the action, mixing individual anecdotes with big-picture considerations…. The sole satisfying outcome of two recent American interventions in poor nations with incompetent governments is likely to be more superb histories by Hastings. A definitive history, gripping from start to finish but relentlessly disturbing.” - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)“Monumental….Hastings sees the Vietnam War in much the same way as that anguished villager. In his telling, it was a conflict without good guys….Through vivid accounts of battle and suffering, Hastings shows that the American war machine devastated the society it intended to save….he deserves enormous credit for helping us, half a century after the peak of the fighting, to see beyond old arguments about which side was right. What is visible when the blinders come off is indeed no pretty sight.” - New York Times Book Review“A work of considerable quality, marked by a possibly unique combination of military expertise, historical grasp and journalistic skill in unearthing hitherto undiscovered human stories of the war, as well as judiciously selecting from among others already known. It helps, too, not to be an American, because that lends a certain useful distance…. It is a very sad story and one that Hastings tells very well.” - Guardian“Vietnam is a product of Hastings’ prodigious research and his aptitude for pungent judgments. It is an unsparing look, by a warm friend of America, at the mountain of mendacities, political and military….Almost every Hastings page contains riveting facts…. as successful as printed words can be in achieving his aim of answering the question ‘What was the war like?’” - Houston Chronicle“A gripping, well-researched look at a divisive American war.” - New York Post

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.