Ho

The late Pulitzer-winning Halberstam made his reputation in large part for his reporting on the Vietnam War but was dissatisfied with his first book on the topic, 1965's The Making of a Quagmire, feeling that it did not connect the American intervention to the earlier French colonial war nearly enough. Setting out to gain more expertise on Vietnamese history, he had gathered much more material by the time he was asked to write this short biography of Vietnam's communist leader, Ho Chi Minh. The Ho that emerges from these pages is a nationalist-pragmatist, a view that was not particularly popular at the time of publication but has gained more currency in the ensuing years. The reader should understand that the biography is somewhat selective in focus as Halberstam's overarching purpose in writing the work was to convince Americans of the era that the communist-nationalists led by Ho were bound to win the war. Annotation c2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

David Halberstam (1934–2007) was the author of 20 books, the last 14 of which have been national best-sellers. His most recent book, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, is about the Chinese entry into the Korean War. He was the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in Vietnam and was a member of the elective Society of American Historians.