Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best political history of the Vietnam War, 16 Aug 2006
This is an amazingly good political history of the machinations of the JFK and LBJ administrations and their involvement in Vietnam. Full of detail about the policy makers, military top brass, bureaucrats etc and contains a large amount of analysis of the decision making process and its influences and outcomes.
The book is rather lengthy and yet does not cover the events following Nixon's election in 1968, which is a shame.
Despite this, however, the 'Best and the Brightest' is one of my favourite books and I have since bought other titles by the author and found them excellent, if not up to quite the same standard.
Belongs on the shelf next to 'Bright Shining Lie', 'Fire in the Lake', and Karnow's 'Vietnam: a History'. First class.
|
|
|
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best of its genre, EVER, 25 Jul 1999
By A Customer
I am a political history junkie. I read everything I can get my hands on that deals with that subject. And Halberstam's book is, IMHO, simply the best book ever written in that category. He analyzes our involvement in Viet Nam by analyzing the personalities, motivations, and fears of the individuals who made the decisions. This results in a far more human approach to the subject than is usually found in books of this kind - and in my opinion leads to a more accurate depiction of what happened.And the writing - Oh, the writing! I read this book 25 years ago, and I can still remember full paragraphs almost word for word. In one page of well chosen anecdotes, he can brilliantly bring to life a Lyndon Johnson or a Robert MacNamara, and make the reader feel as if he knew those public figures personally. Even if you're not as interested in the Viet Nam war or political history as I am, this book should be on your reading list. The word "great" is properly reserved for a very small number of works, but "The Best and the Brightest" belongs in that category.
|
|
|
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A large and superb book focused on the origins of the war, 29 Jun 1999
By A Customer
A large-scale work focused on the origins of the war, this book was the first of its kind by far -- published in 1972, it was written without the benefit of the Pentagon Papers. It's also entirely unreferenced, which would be troubling except for the fact that its conclusions have mostly stood up to the test of time. The depth is impressive, one of the results of its large size; at about 400,000 words, it is larger than any Vietnam War history I know of. (Karnow's "Vietnam: A History," for example, is about 330,000 words.) Especially good are the unusually detailed portraits of the principal figures involved in the origins, including Bob McNamara, President Johnson, Dean Rusk, President Kennedy, Mac Bundy, and Max Taylor. It ends with Nixon's 1968 election.Besides being a great historical resource, this book shows the amazing degree to which the problems and deceptions surrounding Vietnam were known in the late 1960's. Although many useful Vietnam histories have been published in the last five years, they add only marginally to what was known and written by Halberstam and others thirty years ago.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
Get the UK edition of
The Discovery of the
Child.
by David Halberstam
by David Halberstam
by Stanley Karnow
by Robert S. McNamara
