The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam | 誠品線上

The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam

內容簡介

內容簡介 In this epic biography of Edward Lansdale (1908- 1987), the man said to be the fictional model for Graham Greene's The Quiet American, best-selling historian Max Boot demonstrates how Lansdale pioneered a "hearts and mind" diplomacy, first in the Philippines, then in Vietnam. It was a visionary policy that, as Boot reveals, was ultimately crushed by America's giant military bureaucracy, steered by elitist generals and blueblood diplomats who favored troop build-ups and napalm bombs over winning the trust of the people. Through dozens of interviews and access to neverbefore-seen documents-including long-hidden love letters-Boot recasts this cautionary American story, tracing the bold rise and the crashing fall of the roguish "T. E. Lawrence of Asia" from the battle of Dien Bien Phu to the humiliating American evacuation in 1975. Bringing a tragic complexity to this so-called "ugly American," this "engrossing biography" (Karl Marlantes) rescues Lansdale from historical ignominy and suggests that Vietnam could have been different had we only listened. With reverberations that continue to play out in Iraq and Afghanistan, The Road Not Taken is a biography of profound historical consequence.

作者介紹

作者介紹 About the AuthorMax BootA renowned military historian and Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Max Boot is a regular contributor to the New York Times, Foreign Policy, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications. The author of The Savage Wars of Peace and the New York Times best-selling Invisible Armies, he lives in New York.

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