The living and the dead : Robert McNamara and five lives of a lost war

Resource Information

The work The living and the dead : Robert McNamara and five lives of a lost war represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Peabody Public Library. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

This resource has been enriched with EBSCO NoveList data.

Label

The living and the dead : Robert McNamara and five lives of a lost war

Title remainder

Robert McNamara and five lives of a lost war

Statement of responsibility

Paul Hendrickson

Creator

• trueHendrickson, Paul, 1944-
• Hendrickson, Paul, 1944-

Subject

• trueMcNamara, Robert S, 1916-
• McNamara, Robert S, 1916-2009
• trueUnited States -- Military policy
• trueUnited States -- Politics and government -- 1961-1969
• trueHistory writing -- United States -- Politicians
• Vietnam War, 1961-1975 -- United States
• trueVietnam War, 1961-1975 -- United States
• trueUnited States, Secretary of Defense
• trueHistory writing -- Wars and conflicts -- Vietnam War

Genre

• trueHistory writing

Language

eng

Summary

This brilliant, explosive, and passionate book reveals the Vietnam War as we never before have seen it - through the prism of Robert McNamara's crucial and tangled decision-making. It is a book that examines not only the genesis - in McNamara's life and character - of his wartime decisions, but how they altered forever the fates of four men and a woman who, beyond their own human importance, might be said to stand in for all who were caught in the maelstrom that was Vietnam. In McNamara's looming shadow we are shown, in equally intense detail, five people who were caught up in the wake of his life-and-death decisions: an artist whose long-harbored rage erupts on a Massachusetts ferry as he tries to kill McNamara, by then retired from the Cabinet; a young Marine physically and psychologically scarred by Vietnam battle; a Quaker who immolated himself in protest outside the Pentagon; a nurse desperate to believe her agonies in Vietnam were for a good cause; and a member of a Saigon family enlisted, and then tragically abandoned, by the Americans. More than a decade in the making, The Living and the Dead is meticulously researched, astonishing in its revelations, and often in conflict with McNamara's own version of events

Award

Booklist Editors' Choice, 1996.

Biography type

contains biographical information

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

959.704/3373

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

LC call number

DS558

LC item number

.H445 1996

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography

Target audience

adult