Logevall

In "Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam" (Random House, 2012), Cornell historian Fredrik Logevall traces France's efforts to hold on to its colony Vietnam and the United States' complicity with that effort; political machinations that led to America's entry into Vietnam; and a disastrous war whose effects linger decades after the fall of Saigon in 1975.

Logevall, the John S. Knight Professor of International Studies at Cornell and director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, begins his story in 1919 at the Versailles Peace Conference -- where Ho Chi Minh petitioned Woodrow Wilson and other Western leaders for Vietnamese independence -- and ends it in 1959, when the Viet Cong killed two American officers whose names became the first carved in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Drawing on newly available French, U.S. and Vietnamese diplomatic records and scholarship by himself and others, Logevall details what his publisher calls "years of political, military and diplomatic maneuvering and miscalculation, as leaders on all sides embark on a series of stumbles that makes an eminently avoidable struggle a bloody and interminable reality."

Provided

Calling "Embers of War" "the most comprehensive history of that time," The New York Times writes that Logevall "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."

Logevall, a specialist on U.S. foreign relations, joined Cornell's Department of History in 2004. His 1999 book "Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam," details American policymaking in Vietnam in the early 1960s and demonstrates that U.S. officials chose war over a political solution.

"Embers of War" has been named an editor's choice by The New York Times. The Wall Street Journal calls it "A monumental history ... a widely researched and eloquently written account of how the U.S. came to be involved in Vietnam ... certainly the most comprehensive review of this period to date." The Economist refers to it as "a remarkable new history," and Foreign Affairs calls it "magisterial."