Vietnam's Horrible Logic

Mark Bowden writes gripping accounts of war, and Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam does not disappoint.  He does not shy away from showing the grim realities of combat.  He explains horrible wounds, methods of death, the filth, the smell, the terrible fear.  Bowden in no way glorifies battle, in fact, he shows us its awful outcomes.

Hue was one of the most important battles in the Vietnam War.   As the subtitle suggests, it was a turning point in American perceptions about the worth of the effort.  After reading Bowden’s book, one has to only conclude that despite Tet’s strategic and tactical failure, it was a win for the other side.  This is all of the horrible logic of the Vietnam War.

Departing Timelines

The Years of Rice and Salt: A Novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, is a 784 epic covering an alternative historical time line from the Middle Ages to (roughly) the present.  Like all alternate histories, there is a point of departure.  In this novel, the Black Death kills all Europeans with the exception of small pockets in northern Scotland.

The novel is a heady mix of adventure, speculation, religious philosophy and ventures into historiography.  For a popular “genre” novel, or any novel for that matter, Robinson deploys an impressive array of knowledge of the cultures he deploys.  The world is divided between empires of sub-continent Indians, the Chinese, various Muslim emirates, and a New World empire originating with the Iroquois Confederacy, and expanding to most of North and South America.  

Sure, Robinson deploys impressive “historical” knowledge in explaining the big picture of his world (although toward the end, there is a great deal of speech making among the characters, which while important, is probably too long) but ultimately this novel is about characters whose names begin with B and K.  They are constantly reincarnated, assuming new guises and, in a sense, evolving as they are reborn.

This is work quite an accomplishment.  One has to wonder what a stiff, messy disaster Salmon Rushdie would have done with the same type of material.  Robinson avoids this, giving us an entertaining and smart novel; two qualities that are difficult to deliver.

Too Much For Too Little

Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? by Graham Allison overstates its case and presents too much infrastructure in proving its point.  You don’t need to read or know about Thucydides to understand that an established great power (in this case, the United States) will feel threatened by an emerging great power (here the PRC).

So, there is too much here for too simple of an idea. This is yet again one of those works that could be explained in a page; there is no need for a full length book on the subject.