A balanced, deeply researched history of how, as French colonial rule faltered, a succession of American leaders moved step by step down a road toward full-blown war.
Pulitzer Prize citation
A monumental history . . . a widely researched and eloquently written account of how the U.S. came to be involved in Vietnam . . . certainly the ... Read moremost comprehensive review of this period to date.
Wall Street Journal
Fredrik Logevall's excellent book Choosing War (1999) chronicled the American escalation of the Vietnam War in the early 1960s. With Embers of War, he has written an even more impressive book about the French conflict in Vietnam and the beginning of the American one. . . . It is the most comprehensive history of that time. Logevall, a professor of history at Cornell University, has drawn from many years of previous scholarship as well as his own. And he has produced a powerful portrait of the terrible and futile French war from which Americans learned little as they moved toward their own engagement in Vietnam.
The New York Times Book Review-Editor's Choice
This is an excellent study of this crucial period in post-war history, and a compelling account both of the French struggle in Vietnam and the way in which the United States was dragged into a war she couldn't really win.
History of War 03/08/2015
Embers of War , a remarkable new history of the first Vietnamese war by Fredrik Logevall
The Economist
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