Why Vietnam Matters - Rufus Phillips

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Skip gave this to Ray Herndon saying it was the best yarn about Viet Nam he had read. On that recommendation I bought a copy. Sorry Skipper, I've read better.

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It is a GOOD book based primarily on the CIA/American advisors interworking with the South Vietnamese. Most of the book concerns the nuts and bolts of the war. There is quite a lot of detail about the natives and their small villages and hamlets. The author, Rufus Phillips, was there to win hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese. The reason why the United States military was there is left unclear. The reader is asked to believe that winning the people to our side was the most important factor of potential success, yet the author makes certain the reader understands that it didn't work.

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The reader is buried in minutia and lost in the labrynth of foreign names. Oddly, the first two thirds of the book pleads for a once successful operative in Vietnam, an  "old hand"  named Edward Landsdale, to return to Viet Nam, win the war, and fix everything. He didn't return and it didn't happen. For anyone truly interested in the Viet Nam story, I suggest they start on page 291 (Humphrey loses, Nixon takes over). The last part of the book is easily the most important and most valuable.

P.S. According to the author we won the military war and then lost it quiting and leaving the country helpless. Will that lesson influence the wind down of the war in Iraq.! 

The Year of Living Biblically - A.J. Jacobs

The book is different. Very different. The guy who wrote it is up front with his quirks. He is so far out in la-la land that the thesis of the book is lost behind whatever makes him tick. He takes great pains to show how eccentric his personality is, yet he has written a quietly funny book. It makes the reader chose between laughing at: (1) what he says relating to the Bible -(2) or laughing at the tinsel show of a fairly bright Jewish intellectual geek. He is convincingly one very neuotic person. He writes rather well - yet one comes away saying something like:

"Okay I read it. So what".
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