Swedish-born historian and professor at Cornell University Fredrik Logevall has written a remarkable new book entitled “Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam” on the first Vietnamese war leading to partition of Vietnam in 1954.
“Embers of War” traces the path that led two Western nations to lose their way in Vietnam. It opens in 1919 at the Versailles Peace Conference and concludes in 1959 with a Viet Cong ambush on a U.S. outpost outside Saigon and the deaths of two American officers, whose names would be the first to be carved on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In between come years of political, military, and diplomatic maneuvering and miscalculation, as leaders on all sides embark on a series of stumbles that makes an eminently avoidable struggle a bloody and interminable reality.
