THIS EVENING PBS begins airing Ken Burns's new 10-part Vietnam War documentary, co-directed by Lynn Novick and written by Geoffrey C. Ward, Burns's longtime collaborator. Although Burns's team has produced many epic histories - on jazz, baseball, the American West - his 1990 Civil War series made him into the nation's most laureled documentarían. Clocking in at 18 hours, "The Vietnam War" is Burns's most anticipated work since that magisterial feat. As before, Ward has written a weighty companion book to the series. "The Vietnam War: An Intimate History" tells once again the painful tale of America's protracted, divisive and (most would now agree) futile involvement in the fight to keep South Vietnam unconquered by the Communist North. After filling in the historical background, the book ranges over two decades, from Dien Bien Phu in 1954, when the French left their former colony in defeat, to the 1975 fall of Saigon, when the United States left. It's all here: the Gulf of Tonkin and the Tet offensive, the Perfume River and the Ho Chi Minh Trail, napalm and draft notices and teach-ins and My Lai, P.O.W.s and fragging and Kent State and the Christmas bombing, and much more. Numerous historians, of course, have already written exemplary histories of the war. To distinguish this book, Burns and Novick, in their introduction, proclaim their intention to do what few have done: recount the war from not just the American viewpoint but from that of the North and South Vietnamese too. (One pioneering academic work offering such perspective is Lien-Hang Nguyen's "Hanoi's War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam.") This intention is laudable; more than a century ago Lord Acton called for a history of Waterloo "that satisfies French and English, German and Dutch alike." In the end, though, apart from a few sections - including an oddly starry-eyed sketch of Ho Chi Minh - Ward pursues this goal of a multinational account in only a desultory, sporadic way. The introduction also tries to differentiate the book by spotlighting stories of "ordinary" participants in the war: "grunts and officers in the Army and Marines, prisoners of war, a fighter pilot and a helicopter crew chief... a nurse, college students, reporters" and more. Ward and Burns did something similar in "The Civil War," relying on soldiers' letters from both sides, and in their 2007 series on World War II. Once again, the personal testimonies effectively capture the ground-level experience of the conflict. Memorable vignettes and arresting details abound in "The Vietnam War," like the scene of American prisoners deciding to skin and eat the camp commander's cat, or the reminder that eight of 10 servicemen never saw combat. And yet to those who've read in the existing literature, many of these soldiers' stories will sound awfully familiar. We hear from Lt. Col. John Paul Vann (featured in Neil Sheehan's "A Bright Shining Lie"), Philip Caputo (the author of "A Rumor of War"), W.D. Ehrhart (the poet and memoirist) and others already famous from well-known books. Besides, the recollections in "The Vietnam War," though often moving or insightful, don't always advance the book's narrative. In "The Civil War," epistolary excerpts from soldiers like Elisha Hunt Rhodes and Sam Watkins were brilliantly employed to convey the grunts' experiences while simultaneously providing needed exposition. Here, the individuals' anecdotes tend to stand alone as set pieces, disconnected from what follows. Undercutting the narrative thrust further is the layout - sumptuous to behold but unfriendly to readers. The main text is laced through a gallimaufry of maps, photos, captions and sidebars, and rendered mostly in flat prose. The result is a coffeetable book aspiring to be a history book that reads like a textbook. In literary grace, it ranks behind another companion book to another PBS documentary, Stanley Karnow's "Vietnam: A History," from 1983. One major problem for any narrative account of the Vietnam War lies in the nature of the conflict. The Civil War ground on from clash to clash, place to place, progressing relentlessly and suspensefully toward its culmination, with key battles like Gettysburg and Vicksburg providing dramatic pivots. The Vietnam War played out differently, in countless skirmishes that lacked strategic consequence. Questions of who was winning and losing were forever murky, and not only because Presidents Johnson and Nixon deceived Americans about the prospects for victory. In the face of implacable North Vietnamese resolve, even successful military campaigns simply didn't do much. Thus, when recounting some of the important battles - ?? ??? early in the war, the fighting at Hue during the 1968 Tet offensive - Ward's writing comes alive, but only for a short spell. And he's chosen to cover so many topics that after each combat tale, the reader is inevitably diverted elsewhere. In "The Civil War," priority went to the military story, then to politics and last to society and culture. That ordering may have been old-fashioned, but it made sense given how crucial combat was to determining the war's outcome. By contrast, with Vietnam, especially by the late 1960s, the political narrative - not the battlefield developments - most compelled Americans' interest. Readers of this volume, like Americans in the 1960s or '70s, won't be waiting for a game-changing victory like Ulysses Grant's hard-won 1865 triumph at Petersburg. Rather, they will look to the political dramas: Lyndon Johnson's decision to forsake re-election in 1968, the Moratorium protests of October 1969, Henry Kissinger's exhaustive Paris peace talks. We wait expectantly not for a victory at the front lines but for the moment when America consents to withdraw. overall, this political history is well told, though Ward makes one big error. In 1968, Richard Nixon, the Republican presidential nominee, secretly worked a back channel to the South Vietnamese to undermine Johnson's diplomacy. That subterfuge was illegal and immoral, but there's scant evidence that it alone led the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, to reject Johnson's terms. Ward wrongly asserts that Nixon "scuttled the negotiations." One highlight of the book is the five brief stand-alone essays that seek to examine a single question about the war in depth. In particular, the meditations by the Harvard historian Fredrik Logevall, on whether John E Kennedy would have become embroiled in the war, and by the onetime antiwar activist Todd Gitlin, on the movement's legacy, offer original assessments in the kind of personal voice that's mostly missing from the book. However, one otherwise evocative rumination by the novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen is marred by a surprisingly blinkered dismissal of not just the entire corpus of American films about the war, but also most of the "American books about the war, fiction or nonfiction." So much for "Apocalypse Now," "Full Metal Jacket," "The Best and the Brightest," "Dispatches," "Fire in the Lake," "The Things They Carried" and other filmed and written works that provided source material for this very volume. Perhaps the most worthwhile contribution of "The Vietnam War" is its compilation of hundreds of astonishing photographs. Ward and Burns reproduce nowfamous images like Eddie Adams's picture of a Vietcong prisoner being shot in the head at close range and Nick Ut's shot of a naked Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm raid. But they also include powerful and less familiar scenes of rubble-strewn streets, desperate villagers, bewildered squadrons, and Americans and Vietnamese alike who are wounded, maimed, dying or freshly killed. If "The Vietnam War" falls short as scholarly or even bedside reading, though, it remains a vivid and often captivating volume - and, construed literally as a companion to the television series, a valuable resource. Twenty-seven years after it aired, the "Civil War" documentary is now streaming on Netflix, as gripping as ever, still a spark for conversations and learning and discovery. The companion volume is not what people remember. The political narrative - not the battlefield developments - most compelled Americans' interest.

A sweeping, richly illustrated narrative of a conflict fast retreating in memory, one that noted documentarian Burns calls a "lamentable chapter in history."As they have done in numerous collaborations (The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, 2014, etc.), Ward and Burns take a vast topic and personalize it. Regarding the Vietnam War, this involved tracking down veterans of the war and recounting their experiences to gain insight into how great events play out on the individual levelthus the "intimate" element of the subtitle. Of particular value is the inclusion of Vietnamese voices on both sides of the conflict, most of whom agree more than four decades later that the question of who won or lost is less important than the fact that no one really prevailed. Ward and Burns use several of these figures as returning characters in the narrative. One, for instance, is Vincent Okamoto, a Japanese-American soldier born in a relocation camp during World War II, who recalls a Southern soldier's advice for not being confused for one of the enemy: "Hey, no offense, partner; but if I was you I'd dye my hair blond and whistle Dixie' when it gets dark." Other figures are relegated to revealing walk-on roles, such as a Vietnamese operative who, with the "pride of a revolutionary," coordinated the assassinations of hundreds of South Vietnamese and American soldiers and officials. The text is accompanied by more than 500 photographs, some of them immediately recognizablethe execution of a Viet Cong on the streets of Saigon, children running to greet a returning American prisoner of warmany others fresh. As ever, Ward and Burns aim for a middle-of-the-road, descriptive path, but the very nature of this enterprise courts controversy, as when they remind readers of Richard Nixon's secret negotiations with North Vietnam while he was a candidate for president, an act that Lyndon Johnson privately deemed treasonous. Accompanying the PBS series to be aired in September 2017, this is an outstanding, indispensable survey of the Vietnam War. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

*Starred Review* In their new intimate yet capacious history, the award-winning, audience-enthralling duo of historian and screenwriter Ward and documentarian extraordinaire Burns investigate the complex, divisive, and tragic Vietnam War from a unique plurality of perspectives. The consistently lucid, flowing, and dramatic narrative begins with French colonial rule in Indochina, then marches forward through every phase of Vietnam's struggle for independence, the international intervention that divided the country, the ensuing civil war, and the Cold War-instigated, ultimately catastrophic American embroilment over four administrations. With the combined impact of robustly detailed writing and more than 500 staggering photographs, Ward and Burns thoroughly chronicle horrific combat and relentless bombing missions, the mass deployment of napalm and Agent Orange, the suffering and death of civilians, the resiliency of North Vietnamese forces, and the powerful antiwar movement. The eye-opening stories of key public figures, from Ho Chi Minh and Ngo Dinh Diem to Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, are matched by those of ordinary people, including American and South and North Vietnamese soldiers and their families; an American doctor POW; a woman field nurse; a young, long-separated North Vietnamese couple; antiwar activists, including war veterans; and Vietnamese refugees. With reflections by prominent journalists and writers, including Philip Caputo and Viet Thanh Nguyen, this is a vivid, affecting, definitive, and essential illustrated history. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Powerful in its own right, this superlative volume will be released with much fanfare and a 350,000 print run in conjunction with the September airing of Burns and Ward's 10-part PBS series.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist

Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Burns continues his tradition of narrating the audio abridgment of his documentary work, as he has done before with The Civil War, The National Parks, and other projects. The results are mixed, but that's not because Burns lacks talent as a narrator; he has a measured, clear voice, and a strong delivery. Rather, the abridgment itself and the limitations of the audio format cause this product to falter-missing are the intense battle images, the unforgettable music of the 1960s and '70s, and the personal interviews with Vietnamese speakers. Here, the only eyewitness recordings spliced in with the narration are ones by Americans. As a result, Burns, with his natural American accent, becomes the mouthpiece for Vietnamese soldiers and civilians, which creates a distance for the listener. The recordings of U.S. presidents with various generals and advisers becomes tedious in the audiobook, with Burns merely reading "Johnson" and "McNamara" followed by a rendering of their remarks. A Knopf hardcover. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

In their latest collaboration (after The Civil War: An Illustrated History), Burns and Ward present the details of the Vietnam War (November 1, 1955-April 30, 1975). This companion volume to the ten-part film series airing on PBS this September will enlighten readers to the events that led up to the war, the combat itself, and its aftermath. The authors use archived material and interviews with soldiers and antiwar protestors to tell the story; brief essays by historians and Vietnamese fighters are also offered throughout. Further included are newly classified transcripts from American and Vietnamese politicians revealing the event from all sides, including perspectives of the North Vietnamese soldiers. The finest aspect of the volume may be the stunning yet devastating pictures of the time period. Unique details include artist Maya Lin's model for the Vietnam Memorial and the contact sheet of Eddie Adams's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of the death of a North Vietnamese man. VERDICT A powerful work that adds value and insight to any collection. Fans of Burns and Ward will be awed by their mastery in creating an accurate, thorough historical narrative.-Jason L. Steagall, Gateway Technical Coll. Lib., Elkhorn, WI © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Since the Vietnam War, several hundred books, thousands of periodical articles, and dozens of movies have been produced, mostly adding to the controversy over the war. Left-wingers cling to their copies of Stanley Karnow's Vietnam: A History (CH, Jan'84), maintaining that the US should never have become involved. Right-wingers find solace in Mark Moyar's Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (CH, May'07, 44-5183), proclaiming that the US could have won the war if only it had used different tactics. Historian Ward portrays the perspective of all sides. Those Americans who fought the war believed they were fighting to protect freedom. Opponents of the war saw it as immoral. Even those who fled to Canada are viewed as heroes who gave up their friends, neighbors, and families rather than partake in an unjust war. Ward has collaborated on numerous occasions with filmmaker Ken Burns, the most famous being their documentary The Civil War (1990). A well-written text, excellent maps, iconic photographs, and a superb bibliography make this a mandatory purchase for all libraries and an excellent gift for those who fought for the war in Vietnam or against it in the streets of US cities. The subtitle could well be "A Time for Healing." Summing Up: Essential. All public and academic levels/libraries. --Michael O'Donnell, CUNY College of Staten Island