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

This fascinating narrative is now the best English-language account of the First Indochina War and one of the two most readable accounts of the whole sequel of wars in Indochina. The other is the late Stanley Karnow's Vietnam: A History (1983). Fredrik Logevall's book, firmly based on the latest international research, represents a tremendous achievement by a still-young scholar, whose study of the 1963–1965 period, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (1999) should be rated as just one of several good works on the subject, and whose hasty textbook The Origins of the Vietnam War (2001) cannot match its competitors. Logevall is an international historian of Swedish origin with profound knowledge of France, Indochina, and both camps in the Cold War. Yet Embers of War is primarily a contribution to American history. Logevall has prepared himself thoroughly for the task of writing this mature and well-balanced book by reading widely, teaching at Cornell University, coediting with Mark A. Lawrence The First Vietnam War: Colonial Conflict and Cold War Crisis (2007), and coauthoring or editing five other books on terrorism, the U.S. Cold War, and U.S. general history.