Review essays and statements written for special occasions may reveal as much about the writer as those written about; this is the presumption undergirding this collection of thirty-five years of criticism and commentary by Irving Louis Horowitz. For this volume, he selected his comments on famous, near famous, and infamous sociologists, political scientists, and assorted literary figures in between. Taken as a whole, this volume will surprise and delight readers who are acquainted with Horowitz's other works as well as those who are interested in the people he writes about.The book covers notable social scientists, from Arendt to Zetterberg, and such major figures in between as Becker, Bell, de Jouvenel, Mills, Parsons, Solzhenitsyn, and more than eighty others who have had an effect on the contemporary social and political landscape. Each is critically examined, sometimes positively, other times negatively. Horowitz was a major figure in his own right, and his writing here displays the kind of refreshing frankness experts will expect and the general reader will appreciate.The underlying assumption behind the volume, giving its disparate parts a unified characteristic, is that together these observations on others amount to a general perspective on social science held by the author. Whether his larger ambition is accepted or disputed, there is no doubt that the volume provides a standard against which to measure the literary quality of writing in the world of professional social research.

The signing of the Paris Agreement in 1973 ended not only America's Vietnam War but also Richard Nixon's best laid plans. After years of secret negotiations, threats of massive bombing and secret diplomacy designed to shatter strained Communist alliances, the president had to settle for a peace that fell far short of his original aims.

Colonel Pat Proctor’s long overdue critique of the Army’s preparation and outlook in the all-volunteer era focuses on a national security issue that continues to vex in the twenty-first century: Has the Army lost its ability to win strategically by focusing on fighting conventional battles against peer enemies? Or can it adapt to deal with the greater complexity of counterinsurgent and information-age warfare? In this blunt critique of the senior leadership of the U.S. Army, Proctor contends that after the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. Army stubbornly refused to reshape itself in response to the new strategic reality, a decision that saw it struggle through one low-intensity conflict after another—some inconclusive, some tragic—in the 1980s and 1990s, and leaving it largely unprepared when it found itself engaged—seemingly forever—in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The first book-length study to connect the failures of these wars to America’s disastrous performance in the war on terror, Proctor’s work serves as an attempt to convince Army leaders to avoid repeating the same mistakes.

Provides a comprehensive narrative history of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s, giving full and unbiased treatment. It also discusses why Americans tried so hard to stop the spread of Communism into Indochina. And why they failed. Blending Vietnamese and American political, diplomatic, and military history, this book presents U.S. involvement in southeast Asia as an episode in the forty-year Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. It also points out the French effort to reimpose colonialism on Vietnam. The third edition of History of the Vietnam War has been revised to include an expanded account of the postwar period, leading to the restoration of normal relations between the U.S. and Vietnam on July 11, 1995. It reveals the strong national identity of the Vietnamese people against Kennedy, a committed "Cold Warrior". It also analyzes media coverage of the war and the anti-war movement in the U.S., to demonstrate that neither really turned public opinion against the war.