STANLEY KARNOW

In Vietnam: A History, Karnow has produced the most comprehensive, fair-minded and enthralling account of one of this century's most controversial wars. Panoramic in scope, profound in understanding, and compassionate in human portrayals, it is filled with fresh revelations drawn from secret documents and from exclusive interviews with hundreds of participants on both sides. The central theme of the book is that America's leaders, prompted as much by domestic politics as by global ambitions, carried the United States into Southeast Asia with little regard for the realities of the region. The chain of events that led to the deployment of thousands of American troops has been set into its deeper historical context - especially the growth of Vietnamese nationalism over two millennia. This is the essential work for anyone seeking to understand what happened in Vietnam, and why.

In July 1947, fresh out of college and long before he would win the Pulitzer Prize and become known as one of Americas finest historians, Stanley Karnow boarded a freighter bound for France, planning to stay for the summer. He stayed for ten years, first as a student and later as a correspondent for Time magazine. By the time he left, Karnow knew Paris so intimately that his French colleagues dubbed him "le plus parisien des Americains" --the most Parisian American. Now, Karnow returns to the France of his youth, perceptively and wittily illuminating a time and place like none other. Karnow came to France at a time when the French were striving to return to the life they had enjoyed before the devastation of World War II. Yet even during food shortages, political upheavals, and the struggle to come to terms with a world in which France was no longer the mighty power it had been, Paris remained a city of style, passion, and romance. Paris in the Fifties transports us to Latin Quarter cafes and basement jazz clubs, to unheated apartments and glorious ballrooms. We meet such prominent political figures as Charles de Gaulle and Pierre Mendes-France, as well as Communist hacks and the demagogic tax rebel Pierre Poujade. We get to know illustrious intellectuals, among them Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Andre Malraux, and visit the glittering salons where aristocrats with exquisite manners mingled with trendy novelists, poets, critics, artists, composers, playwrights, and actors. We meet Christian Dior, who taught Karnow the secrets of haute couture, and Prince Curnonsky, Frances leading gourmet, who taught the young reporter to appreciate the complexities of haute cuisine. Karnow takes us to marathon murder trials in musty courtrooms, accompanies a group of tipsy wine connoisseurs on a tour of the Beaujolais vineyards, and recalls the famous automobile race at Le Mans when a catastrophic accident killed more than eighty spectators. Back in Paris, Karnow hung out with visiting celebrities like Ernest Hemingway, Orson Welles, and Audrey Hepburn, and in Paris in the Fifties we meet them too.A veteran reporter and historian, Karnow has written a vivid and delightful history of a charmed decade in the greatest city in the world.

A brilliant, coherent social and political overview spanning three turbulent centuries.San Francisco Chronicle Stanley Karnow won the Pulitzer Prize for this account of Americas imperial experience in the Philippines. In a swiftly paced, brilliantly vivid narrative, Karnow focuses on the relationship that has existed between the two nations since the United States acquired the country from Spain in 1898, examining how we have sought to remake the Philippines in our image, an experiment marked from the outset by blundering, ignorance, and mutual misunderstanding. Stanley Karnow has written the ultimate bookbrilliant, panoramic, engrossingabout American behavior overseas in the twentieth century.The Boston Sunday Globe A page-turning story and authoritative history.The New York Times Perhaps the best journalist writing on Asian affairs.Newsweek