Reviews tagging 'Racial slurs'

The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam

2 reviews

bseigel's review against another edition

challenging reflective slow-paced

4.25

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Content Warnings

Minor: Rape and Racial slurs

maneatingbadger's review

challenging dark informative reflective sad slow-paced

5.0

This is brilliant writing, Halberstam’s journalist background lending his prose that wonderful flow that makes dense chapters breeze by. For the delight of his sentence construction alone I would already recommend this to everyone I know. Not to mention the painful relevance of the subject matter.  

 

There's a depressingly timeless aspect to Halberstam's 1972 account of our backslide into Vietnam. The parallels to the current Global War on Terror, among other things, are obvious, the tropes so classical I'm amazed at his restraint in only once mentioning "Greek tragedy." The narratives traced from the Chinese Civil War through World War II, Korea, and the McCarthy era were yet another revelation we never did and still do not teach history well, if at all. But my biggest takeaway went beyond the "best and brightest" cliche: Forget the Whiz Kids, there were capable, knowledgeable civil servants, military officers, and journalists at nearly every level whose insights, warnings, and recommendations were nevertheless defeated or rendered irrelevant by personality clashes and (often intentional) systemic dysfunction. The arrogance and shortsightedness of social/political elites are nothing new, but the futility of some underlings’ persistent efforts to fix things was infuriating and terrifying. Selfish, short-term bureaucratic loyalty and political expediency defeated moral fiber at every turn, regardless of whether anyone had the courage to speak out, to lose friends or careers, to keep filing accurate memos from “cleared” hamlets straight into ignominious reassignment or ignored filing cabinets. Half a century later, in the throes of renewed military fiascos abroad and economic and public health crises at home, I can’t say that’s changed. 

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Content Warnings

Minor: Racial slurs