The Vietnam War

An Intimate History

Geoffrey C. Ward & Ken Burns

- 4.3 • 50 Ratings

- $13.99

- $13.99

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Based on the celebrated PBS television series, the complete text of an engrossing history of America’s least-understood conflict, “a significant milestone [that] will no doubt do much to determine how the war is understood for years to come.” —The Washington Post

More than forty years have passed since the end of the Vietnam War, but its memory continues to loom large in the national psyche. In this intimate history, Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns have crafted a fresh and insightful account of the long and brutal conflict that reunited Vietnam while dividing the United States as nothing else had since the Civil War. From the Gulf of Tonkin and the Tet Offensive to Hamburger Hill and the fall of Saigon, Ward and Burns trace the conflict that dogged three American presidents and their advisers. But most of the voices that echo from these pages belong to less exalted men and women—those who fought in the war as well as those who fought against it, both victims and victors—willing for the first time to share their memories of Vietnam as it really was. A magisterial tour de force, The Vietnam War is an engrossing history of America’s least-understood conflict.

APPLE BOOKS REVIEW

This is the story of a 20th-century quagmire, told both panoramically and in excruciating close-up. Geoffrey C. Ward’s book—a companion to the documentary film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick—is a history of the Vietnam wars, with France’s imperialist follies on the peninsula presaging with eerie exactness the United States’ costly misadventures. Ward wants us to see with new eyes a war we presume to know well. The result is history as it should be presented: vivid, bracing, and dedicated to truth-telling.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY OCT 30, 2017

Emmy Award winning filmmaker Burns continues his tradition of narrating the audio abridgment of his documentary work, as he has done before with The Civil War, The National Parks, and other projects. The results are mixed, but that's not because Burns lacks talent as a narrator; he has a measured, clear voice, and a strong delivery. Rather, the abridgment itself and the limitations of the audio format cause this product to falter missing are the intense battle images, the unforgettable music of the 1960s and '70s, and the personal interviews with Vietnamese speakers. Here, the only eyewitness recordings spliced in with the narration are ones by Americans. As a result, Burns, with his natural American accent, becomes the mouthpiece for Vietnamese soldiers and civilians, which creates a distance for the listener. The recordings of U.S. presidents with various generals and advisers becomes tedious in the audiobook, with Burns merely reading "Johnson" and "McNamara" followed by a rendering of their remarks. A Knopf hardcover.

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