It’s been a long struggle, but, given that persecuted Christian minorities were among the first people to settle this country, not surprising-you could say that oppositional Christianity is part of our cultural heritage. The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (Simon and Schuster) by Frances Fitzgerald Debate concerning the war in the United States was never again about winning, only about how to leave.” Without a doubt, Hue 1968 is one of the very best books to be written about Vietnam in the last decade. Bowden concludes that the “battle and the offensive of which it was a part … altered the strategic equation in Vietnam. The Communists took the city knowing they could not hold it, and the Americans virtually destroyed the place wresting it back. The story of Hue, like the story of Vietnam, is awash in paradox, irony, and senseless destruction. His account limns many of the ambitions, delusions, and misconceptions on both sides that made the war such a vicious and destructive tragedy. The author of the much-acclaimed Black Hawk Downtreats Hue as a microcosm of the Vietnam War. Mark Bowden’s thoroughly researched and compelling account of the most controversial battle of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam might be taken as a kind of rejoinder to that notion.
It is trendy to say that strategists, generals, and military historians have long placed too much emphasis on big battles in trying to win-or understand-the wars of which they are a part. Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam (Atlantic) by Mark Bowden This book is an indispensable introduction to one of the very greatest Americans. In an age where heroes are hard to come by, we should treasure the man who almost singlehandedly invented the country’s environmental ethic. He was a naturalist and a moralist who practiced what he preached, and when it came to that, he didn’t preach all that much. Thoreau-bashing has been a favorite pastime of cynics for, well, since he was alive, but Walls is no cynic, and she makes a persuasive case that Thoreau doesn’t warrant such maligning. That’s a compliment to Walls, who, without ever fawning, makes you admire her subject-and especially his writing-more and more with each page. Readers of this extraordinary biography will be torn between a desire to stay with Walls’ story or go off and read more Thoreau. Henry David Thoreau: A Life (Chicago) by Laura Dassow Walls
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