The Long Reckoning

October 1, 2022

In The Long Reckoning, award-winning investigative journalist Black (The Good Neighbor) chronicles the efforts of U.S. veterans, scientists, and pacifists and their Vietnamese partners to compel the U.S. government to acknowledge the ongoing damage done by unexploded munitions and the toxic defoliant Agent Orange in Vietnam, particularly in the demilitarized zone. From notable U.S.-based Dutch writer/editor Buruma (The Churchill Complex), The Collaborators examines three figures seen as either heroes or traitors during World War II: Hasidic Jew Friedrich Weinreb, who took money to save fellow Jews but betrayed some of them to the Gestapo; Manchu princess Kawashima Yoshiko, who spied for the Japanese secret police in China; and masseur Felix Kersten, who claimed to have talked Himmler out of killing thousands. Oxford associate professor Healey's The Blazing World portrays 17th-century England as a turbulent society undergoing revolutionary change. A professor of politics and global health at Queen Mary University of London, Kennedy argues in Pathogenesis that it was not human guts and ingenuity but the power of disease-delivering microbes that has driven human history, from the end of the Neanderthals to the rise of Christianity and Islam to the deadly consequences of European colonialism (75,000-copy first printing). Continuing in the vein of his New York Times best-selling The Princess Spy, Loftis introduces us to Corrie ten Boom, The Watchmaker's Daughter, who helped her family hide Jews and refugees from the Gestapo during World War II (100,000-copy first printing). Mar's Seventy Times Seven chronicles Black 15-year-old Paula Cooper's murder of septuagenarian white woman Ruth Pelke in a violent home invasion in 1985 Gary, IN; her subsequent death sentence; and what happened when Pelke's grandson forgave her. Journalist/consultant Roberts fully reveals the Untold Power of Woodrow Wilson's wife Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, who effectively acted as president when her husband was incapacitated. A best seller in the UK when it was published in 2021, Sanghera's Empireland--an exploration of the legacy of British imperialism in the contemporary world--has been contextualized for U.S. audiences and carries an introduction by Marlon James. In Benjamin Banneker and Us, Webster explores the life of her forbear, the Black mathematician and almanac writer who surveyed Washington, DC, for Thomas Jefferson, and his descendants to highlight how structural racism continues to shape our understanding of lineage and family.

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March 20, 2023
Journalist Black (Empire of Shadows) delivers a fascinating study of the ongoing repercussions of the American war in Vietnam. The focus is on a relatively small group of American, Canadian, and Vietnamese scientists, politicians, and military veterans who have worked with the Vietnamese and U.S. governments to ameliorate the “multiple horrors,” including unexploded ordnance and the ill-health effects of exposure to Agent Orange and other defoliants, afflicting Vietnamese civilians. At the center of the narrative are two American veterans who have dedicated their lives to making amends for the war: Chuck Searcy, an Army intelligence analyst during his 1967–1968 tour of duty in Saigon, and Manus Campbell, a former Marine who faced “the horrors of combat in ‘the bush’ ” and endured a long struggle with PTSD. Black movingly recounts both men’s war experiences and the paths that brought them back to Vietnam, where they now live, and details their efforts to raise funds for those orphaned or disabled by the war, deliver prosthetics to amputees, decontaminate and demine military bases, and search for missing American servicemen. Insightful recaps of diplomatic negotiations are interwoven with evocative descriptions of the Vietnamese landscape and brisk summaries of the long campaign for accountability from the American government. The result is a brilliant look at “the long, slow process of healing.”

Starred review from February 1, 2023
A searching look at the devastation wrought by America's war in Vietnam and efforts by veterans to help undo it. "By the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, the politburo of the Vietnamese Communist Party had designated tourism a 'spearhead industry, ' and Vietnam was welcoming close to 18 million foreign visitors a year," writes journalist Black. The tourist attractions did not include the generations of Vietnamese born with horrific birth defects attributable to Agent Orange or missing limbs thanks to unexploded bombs and shells. Enter two Americans who had served in the field during the awful year of 1968. Having wrestled with guilt and PTSD for years after their service, they decided to return to Vietnam and launch efforts to locate and remove unexploded ordnance and remediate rural areas poisoned by chemicals. That program was initiated, Black reveals, under the Kennedy administration, before Vietnam became a full-throated American war. An ironic surprise is that Kurt Vonnegut's brother designed a technique to flood trails used by the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong so that they would become sticky masses of mud, clear inspiration for the Ice-Nine of Cat's Cradle. Black sets much of this vivid narrative on the ground, painstakingly documenting the death-dealing technology America deployed against an enemy--and a civilian populace--that was vastly outgunned but bent on victory. The combat scenes are appropriately scarifying, and a key moment comes when one of the veterans returns with Black to the site of an ambush that killed many men in his unit. Just as effective is the author's account of the politics of international aid and the people who joined, with the two veterans, in their expiatory efforts: Quaker volunteers, epidemiologists and medical researchers, Vietnamese officials, and, most importantly, other veterans seeking redemption and resolution. One of the best recent books on a war that ended half a century ago but that still reverberates.

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