The Living and the Dead
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The Living and the Dead by Paul Hendrickson
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year Finalist for the Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism Meticulous in detail, epic in scope, psychologically sophisticated and spiritually rich, it ranks with The Best and the Brightest and All the President's Men.--San Francisco Chronicle More than the two presidents he served or the 58,000 soldiers who died for his policies, Robert 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. This brilliantly insightful, morally devastating book tells us why he believed, how he lost faith, and what his deceptions cost five of the war's witnesses and McNamara himself. In The Living and the Dead, Paul Hendrickson juxtaposes 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. The result is a book whose exhaustive research and imaginative power turn history into an act of reckoning, damning and profoundly sympathetic, impossible to put down and impossible to forget. A masterpiece. . . . Hendrickson] has a gift with language that most writers can only dream about.
--Philadelphia Inquirer Approaches Shakespearian tragedy.
--The New York Times Book Review
The nonfiction book Sons of Mississippi by Paul Hendrickson earned the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2003. He has been a member of the University of Pennsylvania's Creative Writing Department faculty since 1998. He worked as a staff writer for the Washington Post for two decades before that. Searching for the Light: Marion Post Wolcott's Secret Life and Art (1992 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist) and The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War (1996 National Book Award finalist) are two of his other works. The Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lyndhurst Foundation, and the Alicia Patterson Foundation have all given him literary fellowships.
He was a joint visiting professor of documentary practice and American studies at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2009. He is the father of two adult sons and lives outside of Philadelphia with his wife, Cecilia.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780679781172 |
| ISBN 10 | 067978117X |
| Title | The Living and the Dead |
| Author | Paul Hendrickson |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Random House USA Inc |
| Year published | 1997-10-28 |
| Number of pages | 448 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |