The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam
<p><strong>Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize (Biography)<br /><br><br /><br>A <em>New York Times</em> bestseller, this “epic and elegant” biography (<em>Wall Street Journal</em>) profoundly recasts our understanding of the Vietnam War.</strong></p><br><p>Praised as a “superb scholarly achievement” (<em>Foreign Policy</em>), <em>The Road Not Taken</em> confirms Max Boot’s role as a “master chronicler” (<em>Washington Times</em>) of American military affairs. Through dozens of interviews and never-before-seen documents, Boot rescues Edward Lansdale (1908–1987) from historical ignominy to “restore a sense of proportion” to this “political Svengali, or ‘Lawrence of Asia’ ”(<em>The New Yorker</em>). Boot demonstrates how Lansdale, the man said to be the fictional model for Graham Greene’s <em>The Quiet American</em>, pioneered a “hearts and minds” diplomacy, first in the Philippines and then in Vietnam. Bringing a tragic complexity to Lansdale and a nuanced analysis to his visionary foreign policy, Boot suggests Vietnam could have been different had we only listened.</p><br><p>With contemporary reverberations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, <em>The Road Not Taken</em> is a “judicious and absorbing” (<em>New York Times Book Review</em>) biography of lasting historical consequence.</p>