Currently reading
Vineland (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)
Tristes Tropiques
Richard III
The Dwarf
The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen
Labyrinths
Giotto to Dürer: Early Renaissance Painting in the National Gallery
Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
Gravity's Rainbow
A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel
JFK and Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power
I put this book down somewhere, and likely will never return to it. The issue revolves around two presidential memoranda: on by JFK in Oct. hinting at a phased withdrawal to begin by Dec. 1963; one by LBJ on Nov. 25 opening the door to combat troops. Ellsberg says that RFK personally assured him that JFK was committed to withdrawal after the '64 election. And of course, we know how that all turned out, don't we...?(( This is an outstanding book (currently reading) that details in a fascinatingly detailed and inductive manner the genesis of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and documents, exhaustively, JFK's ambivalent position -- starting from the intervention in Laos in 1961 --, his intention to withdraw after the 1964 election, the increasingly reactionary and vitriolic response of the military hierarchy, and the threads that led from all this to the assassination....
I had expected this book to be rather dense -- but had not expected it to be so compulsively readable, mature, detailed...
The author is a colonel in the U.S. military and a military historian. ))