Robert S. McNamara was the official face of Vietnam, the technocrat with steel-rimmed glasses and an ironclad faith in numbers who kept insisting that the war was winnable long after he had ceased to believe it was.
In his insightful, morally devastating book, The Living and the Dead, Paul Hendrickson juxtaposes Robert S. McNamara's story with those of a wounded Marine, an Army nurse, a Vietnamese refugee, a Quaker who burned himself to death to protest the war, and an enraged artist who tried to kill the man he saw as the war's architect. This is the brilliant, emotional coda where, in meticulous yet compassionate prose, Hendrickson captures his chase after the story of the man and the haunted years of McNamara’s life after Vietnam.
A Vintage Shorts Vietnam Selection. An ebook short.
Paul Hendrickson is a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a winner of it once—for his 2003 Sons of Mississippi. His The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War was a 1996 finalist for the National Book Award. His 2011 Hemingway's Boat was a New York Times best seller and also a best seller in the UK. He has been the recipient of writing fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lyndhurst Foundation, and the Alicia Patterson Foundation. From 1998 to 2024, he was on the faculty of the creative writing program at the University of Pennsylvania, and for two decades before that he was a staff writer at The Washington Post.
View titles by Paul Hendrickson
Robert S. McNamara was the official face of Vietnam, the technocrat with steel-rimmed glasses and an ironclad faith in numbers who kept insisting that the war was winnable long after he had ceased to believe it was.
In his insightful, morally devastating book, The Living and the Dead, Paul Hendrickson juxtaposes Robert S. McNamara's story with those of a wounded Marine, an Army nurse, a Vietnamese refugee, a Quaker who burned himself to death to protest the war, and an enraged artist who tried to kill the man he saw as the war's architect. This is the brilliant, emotional coda where, in meticulous yet compassionate prose, Hendrickson captures his chase after the story of the man and the haunted years of McNamara’s life after Vietnam.
A Vintage Shorts Vietnam Selection. An ebook short.
Paul Hendrickson is a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a winner of it once—for his 2003 Sons of Mississippi. His The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War was a 1996 finalist for the National Book Award. His 2011 Hemingway's Boat was a New York Times best seller and also a best seller in the UK. He has been the recipient of writing fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lyndhurst Foundation, and the Alicia Patterson Foundation. From 1998 to 2024, he was on the faculty of the creative writing program at the University of Pennsylvania, and for two decades before that he was a staff writer at The Washington Post.
View titles by Paul Hendrickson
