The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War - Hardcover

Hendrickson, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679427619 ISBN 13: 9780679427612

Publisher: Knopf, 1996

Synopsis

One of the finest books to emerge from the Vietnam experience, The Living and the Dead presents a brilliant study of Robert McNamara, his decision-making during the war, and the way his decisions affected his own life and the lives of five individuals. A monumental work about power, its abuse, and its victims, this meticulously researched, beautifully written, explosive, and passionate book is often in conflict with McNamara's version of events. First serial in the Washington Post. 8 photos.

About this title

Review:

This book is another worthy step in the 1000- mile trek of trying to figure out what the Vietnam War meant in human terms. (The richest vein struck in this effort thus far still has to be Gloria Emerson's Winners and Losers.) Hendrickson spent most of a decade putting together the story of the war in the lives of Robert McNamara and five less fancy participants in it--a combat Marine who once was on the cover of Life, an Army nurse, the scion of an upper-crust Vietnamese family, a Quaker who set fire to himself outside McNamara's Pentagon office window in 1965, and an artist who, in 1972, tried to throw McNamara over the side of the Martha's Vineyard ferry. Hendrickson's efforts to generate a sense of his characters interacting on a cosmic stage too often flirt with bathos, but his way with the characters themselves is undeniably powerful.

About the Author:

Paul Hendrickson is a feature writer for the Washington Post.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0679427619
• ISBN 13: 9780679427612
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 427