MixedLos Angeles Review of BooksWithout question, Battlegrounds emanates from noble sentiments. The former national security advisor is concerned for our nation’s future and takes readers on a global tour evaluating the threats from Russian disinformation campaigns to Chinese authoritarianism and Iranian efforts to become a nuclear power. The world is a dangerous place, yet in McMaster’s view, self-satisfied American policymakers have placed the nation at risk because they somehow \'forgot that they had to compete.\' ... In Battlegrounds, the potency of current threats facing America are real and the solution clear-cut: we need to shed our \'strategic narcissism\' — the preoccupation with defining the world only in relation to US interests — and confidently project American power abroad.
Mark Bowden
MixedThe Los Angeles Review of BooksOn the ground level, Hu? 1968 makes for compelling, at times even difficult, reading. The killing is relentless. As Bowden raises his sights, however, he relies on overworked clichés that expose a limited grasp of the larger strategic and political issues in a long and complicated war ... Bowden excels in describing the horrific urban warfare that consumed Hu? throughout much of February 1968. As in his earlier book Black Hawk Down, which told the story of the US military experience in Somalia through a single battle, he pulls the reader into the cross fires of combat with breathtaking results ... Bowden skillfully weaves the Vietnamese communists and civilians into his narrative, demonstrating that far more than just US soldiers and marines sacrificed and suffered in Hu? ... Demonstrating authenticity through vivid combat stories surely hooks readers at the ground level, but Bowden then leads them astray on the larger questions of military strategy. If the author is sympathetic to the young combatants unable to make sense of the battle in which they were engaged, he is uncompromisingly critical of the American generals apparently caught flat-footed by the Tet Offensive.
