RaveThe Washington PostDespite its unfortunate subtitle, Honorable Exit is a serious, well-researched and engaging attempt to relate the story of the last days of South Vietnam, or the Republic of Vietnam ... declassified U.S. government documents that shed revealing light on the dismal failure of the Ford administration and the ambassador to South Vietnam, Graham Martin, in particular, to prepare for the repatriation of U.S. personnel and the extraction of Vietnamese whose lives would be in danger if they stayed behind ... Clarke excels at balancing captivating oral history and illuminating political history ... The author’s work as a novelist is evident in the way he delineates key players. The good are very good and the bad, well, very bad ... In its final chapters, Honorable Exit expertly captures the mayhem of South Vietnam’s dying days.
Max Hastings
MixedThe Washington PostMax Hastings’s Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 reads like a gripping work of fiction. The storyline is as fluid as it is riveting, and the main characters are finely delineated ... The suffering and losses endured by civilians are vividly illustrated, humanizing them to a degree few accounts have ... But then Hastings falls into the trap of essentialism, egregiously reducing Hanoi policymakers to narrow, ugly caricatures bordering on travesties ... Fear of the regime, Hastings suggests, was the average Notherner’s only motivation, a proposition so hyperbolic as to be preposterous. The assessment of Southern leaders and combatants is no less galling ... a critical flaw of the book is its failure to seriously engage the ever-expanding documentary record on the Vietnam wars. In at least one instance, Hastings references a document cited elsewhere without crediting that source. As all this suggests, Hastings opted to sacrifice scholarly rigor for the sake of sensationalist retelling. Gratuitously graphic descriptions of massacres and other atrocities permeate the narrative ... For many of the wrong reasons, some readers will love this book. And that is tragic, too.
