Encounter Books

Black April: The Fall of South Vietnam, 1973-75

George J. Veith — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 15:31:23 +0000

The defeat of South Vietnam was arguably America’s worst foreign policy disaster of the 20th Century. Yet a complete understanding of the end-game—from the 27 January 1973 signing of the Paris Peace Accords to South Vietnam’s surrender on 30 April 1975—has eluded us.

Black April addresses that deficit, and is the culmination of exhaustive research in three distinct areas; primary source documents from American archives, North Vietnamese publications containing primary and secondary source material, and dozens of articles and numerous interviews with key South Vietnamese participants. It represents one of the largest Vietnamese translation projects ever accomplished, including almost one hundred rarely or never seen before North Vietnamese unit histories, battle studies, and memoirs. Most important, to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of South Vietnam’s conquest, the leaders in Hanoi released several compendiums of formerly highly classified cables and memorandum between the Politburo and its military commanders in the south. This treasure trove of primary source materials provides the most complete insight into North Vietnamese decision-making ever complied. While South Vietnamese deliberations remain less clear, enough material exists to provide a decent overview.

Ultimately, whatever errors occurred on the American and South Vietnamese side, the simple fact remains that the country was conquered by a North Vietnamese military invasion despite written pledges by Hanoi’s leadership against such action. Hanoi’s momentous choice to destroy the Paris Peace Accords and militarily end the war sent a generation of South Vietnamese into exile, and exacerbated a societal trauma in America over our long Vietnam involvement that reverberates to this day. How that transpired deserves deeper scrutiny.

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“The courageous men and women from South Vietnam, who fought for their country’s independence, have long needed a chronicle. Veith’s book fills that need. It deserves to be widely read.”

Henry Kissinger

“Black April illuminates the last, dark days of a doomed war, and reveals the high quality of the courageous and indomitable Nationalist soldiers who held their heads high and fought on in spite of shortages of even the most basic and essential resources, along with a host of morale and emotional difficulties. Black April is a source of deep, profound understanding of the Vietnam War, which was a life-or-death struggle between the Free World and the forces of democracy against communist dictatorship and repression. Kudos to George J. Veith for writing this book.”

Major General Tran Ba Di
ARVN 9th Division Commander, 1968-1973; Deputy Commander IV Corps, 1973-1974; Commander, Quang Trung Training Center, 1974-April 1975

“Black April illuminates the last, dark days of a doomed war. It reveals the high quality of the courageous and indomitable Nationalist soldiers who held their heads high and who fought on in spite of shortages of even the most basic and essential resources, along with a host of morale and emotional difficulties. Black April is a source of deep, profound understanding of the Vietnam War, which was a life-or-death struggle between the Free World and against communist dictatorship and repression. Kudos to George J. Veith for writing this book.”

Major General Tran Ba Di
Commander, Quang Trung Training Center, 1974-April 1975

“Veith’s exhaustively researched account of the undoing of South Vietnam is rich in detail mined from key South and North Vietnamese participants. Faced with a faltering American ally and a formidably armed North Vietnamese foe, the South was forced to fight what Hanoi called ‘a poor man’s war.’ Veith artfully dissects that war, fought after the signing of the Paris Agreement, unmasking Hanoi’s calculations and challenges, while shedding unique light on the courage of the South Vietnamese military, whose sacrifices while resisting Hanoi’s juggernaut have been ignored by observers over the years. Reading Veith’s gripping account, this reader felt like he was back in Saigon, watching the map turn red as the North Vietnamese marched south.”

Col., retired, Stuart A. Herrington
Author of Peace with Honor? An American Reports on Vietnam, 1973-1975 and Stalking the Vietcong: Inside Operation Phoenix

“In a prodigiously researched military account of the last two years of war in Vietnam after all American troops were withdrawn,George Veith has made a unique and major contribution to setting the historical record straight on the final phase of the conflict in Vietnam. Abandoned by the United States in a shameful failure to insist that the Communist leaders in Hanoi observe the agreements they had signed, and the refusal of Congress to provide the military assistance to which the Republic of Vietnam was entitled under those agreements, the South Vietnamese armed forces far more often than not fought valiantly and tenaciously under the most difficult, at times hopeless, situations against the well prepared military juggernaut converging on Saigon at the end of April 1975.This book makes that case.”

Wolfgang Lehmann
Deputy Ambassador to the Republic of Vietnam 1974-1975

Political Woman: The Big Little Life of Jeane Kirkpatrick

Peter Collier — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 20:16:42 +0000

Political Woman is the first biography of Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan’s UN ambassador and the most forceful presence in the administration in shaping the Reagan Doctrine and fighting the Cold War to a victorious conclusion. Based on countless interviews and unique access to her private papers, Political Woman creates a portrait of an ambitious woman from the epicenter of Middle America determined to break through the glass ceilings of her time and place.

A pioneering feminist, academic, and an important Democratic Party activist, Kirkpatrick would be hated for leading a group of Democratic liberals into the Reagan administration after what she saw as the trashing of the Roosevelt coalition and capitulation to Soviet advances. As Reagan’s UN representative, Kirkpatrick sharpened the spearpoint of a rearmed America ready to join the final battle of the Cold War, staging dramatic clashes over policy toward the Soviets, the Cubans, and the Contras in the process.

Political Woman tells this parallel story—the flight of centrist liberals out of the Democratic Party and the complex chess match of the end game of the Cold War—through the intimate story of a woman who was at the center of these dramas. It also shows the price she paid for her success in a private life filled with sorrow and loss as profound as her epic achievements.

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Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State (Paperback)

William Voegeli — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 19:08:48 +0000

Since the beginning of the New Deal, American liberals have insisted that the government must do more–much more–to help the poor, to increase economic security, to promote social justice and solidarity, to reduce inequality, and to mitigate the harshness of capitalism. Nonetheless, liberals have never answered, or even acknowledged, the corresponding question: What would be the size and nature of a welfare state that was not contemptibly austere, that did not urgently need new programs, bigger budgets, and a broader mandate? Even though the federal government’s outlays have doubled every eighteen years since 1940, liberal rhetoric is always addressed toa nation trapped in Groundhog Day, where every year is 1932, and none of the existing welfare state programs that spend tens of billions of dollars matter, or even exist.

Never Enough explores the roots and consequences of liberals’ aphasia about the welfare state’s ultimate size. It assesses what liberalism’s lack of a limiting principle says about the long-running argument between liberals and conservatives, and about the policy choices confronting America in a new century. Never Enough argues that the failure to speak clearly and candidly about the welfare state’s limits has grave policy consequences. The worst result, however, is the way it has jeopardized the experiment in self-government by encouraging Americans to regard their government as a vehicle for exploiting their fellow-citizens, rather than as a compact for respecting one another’s rights and safeguarding the opportunities of future generations.

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William Voegeli has taken up conservatisms primal mission, “deconstructing the liberal welfare state” from a fresh perspective, understanding that the liberal project is unbound by limiting goals. This understanding, in turn, allows for real insight into why conservatism never has, and likely never will, succeed in rolling back government. Never Enough is a penetrating piece of analysis, and a most valuable contribution to the political conversation.

Peter J. Boyer
Staff writer for The New Yorker since 1992

“Bill Voegeli’s insightful and well crafted book explains why Americans are at once dissatisfied with their welfare state yet apparently willing to see it grow without limit, and also why the long running debate between liberals and conservatives over the welfare state has produced ever more confusion about who should benefit and who should pay for government programs. Voegeli, however, manages to frame this argument in a new way and to show how liberals and conservatives can get beyond their fruitless debates in order to place the American welfare state on a more effective and affordable footing. Never Enough is that rare book that makes a new contribution to an old debate and has something important to say to both liberals and conservatives.”

James Piereson
President of the William E. Simon Foundation and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute

William Voegeli may be the most valuable, engaging and original critic of liberalism writing today. I have been waiting for him to write this book for years. No serious student of contemporary political life will regret their investment in this profound yet eminently accessible work. Never Enough answers questions most people struggle even to articulate.

Jonah Goldberg
Author of Liberal Fascism

Never Enough is a nonpolemical critique of progressive, conservative, and libertarian visions of the welfare state: always more, always less, and none at all. Contending that all three are untenable, William Voegeli offers a highly informative and lucid account of the political and ideological struggles that led to and perpetuate our current unsustainable welfare policies. Beware: whether or not you buy his Pax Voegeli compromise, this book will compel you to clarify and wrestle with your own vision of the welfare state.

Randy E. Barnett
Author of Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty

Every problem deserves a program: this is a driving liberal impulse that has exponentially increased the size and scope of government, giving rise to the never-enough, prosperity stifling state. In this new book, which channels the realistic spirit of Irving Kristol, William Voegeli argues that the welfare state isn’t going to wither away but we can make it leaner, more effective, and less kleptocratic. An essential work in the development of a twenty-first century conservatism.

Brian C. Anderson
Editor, City Journal; author of South Park Conservatives

No Matter What… They’ll Call This Book Racist: How Our Fear of Talking Honestly about Race Hurts Us All

Harry Stein — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 17:24:22 +0000

In the Age of Obama, the racism charge, rather than abating, has become more prevalent than ever. Why? Because to tell the truth about matters like crime, racial profiling, social fallout of single parent homes, or the ways racial preferences distort the very meaning of equity and justice would mean facing up to the soul-destroying pathologies of urban black culture. Instead, black leaders and their guilty white allies blame these problems on historic oppression and lack of government aid, and demonize those who challenge such views as – what else? – racist.

In No Matter What… They’ll Call This Book Racist, Harry Stein attacks the unspoken prohibitions that have long governed the conversation about race, not to offend or shock (though they certainly will) but to provoke the serious thinking that liberal enforcers have until now rendered impossible. Stein examines the ways in which the regime of racial preferences has sown division, corruption, and resentment in this country. He pays special attention to the stifling falsehood that racism has mired millions of underclass blacks in physical and spiritual poverty. The real problem, says Stein, is the culture of destructive attitudes and behaviors that denies those in its grip the means of escape.

For all the remarkable progress this country has made on race in the past half century, liberals insist, for their own political and psychological purposes, on clinging to the notion of America as irredeemably racist. We – and especially black people – for too long have been living with the terrible consequences of that cruel canard.

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“No book I’ve read better captures (and documents) the utter disingenuousness of America’s racial politics over the past half century—the lazy moral unctuousness of white guilt on the one hand, the shakedown mentality of today’s civil rights establishment on the other. But what makes this a compelling read is the way Stein—a cultural journeyer—finds his own moral and political center by unraveling this recent history. He certainly will be called a “racist,” which is why this book is so brave.”

Shelby Steele

Peace, They Say: A History of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Most Famous and Controversial Prize in the World

Jay Nordlinger — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 20:09:27 +0000

In this book, Jay Nordlinger gives a history of what the subtitle calls “the most famous and controversial prize in the world.” The Nobel Peace Prize, like the other Nobel prizes, began in 1901. So we have a neat, sweeping history of the 20th century, and about a decade beyond. The Nobel prize involves a first world war, a second world war, a cold war, a terror war, and more. It contends with many of the key issues of modern times, and of life itself.

It also presents a parade of interesting people—more than a hundred laureates, not a dullard in the bunch. Some of these laureates have been historic statesmen, such as Roosevelt (Teddy) and Mandela. Some have been heroes or saints, such as Martin Luther King and Mother Teresa. Some belong in other categories—where would you place Arafat? Controversies also swirl around the awards to Kissinger, Gorbachev, Gore, and Obama, to name just a handful.

Probably no figure in this book is more interesting than a non-laureate: Alfred Nobel, the Swedish scientist and entrepreneur who started the prizes. The book also addresses “missing laureates,” people who did not win the peace prize but might have, or should have (Gandhi?).

Peace, They Say is enlightening and enriching, and sometimes even fun. It has its opinions, but it also provides what is necessary for readers to form their own opinions. What is peace, anyway? All these people who have been crowned “champions of peace,” and the world’s foremost—should they have been? Such is the stuff this book is made on.

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“Jay Nordlinger is one of America’s most versatile and pungent writers.”

Paul Johnson
Author of Modern Times, etc.

“Nordlinger offers a unique combination of depth and accuracy of knowledge with clarity and elegance of style. It is a pleasure to read sophistication without affectation.”

Bernard Lewis
Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Emeritus, Princeton University

“Few writers are well qualified to write about the world’s cultures, and none more so than Jay Nordlinger. His fascinating history of the Nobel Peace Prize is deeply researched and wittily rendered—like a crowd of contradictory characters in a Shakespeare tragedy? comedy?”

Robert Conquest
Author of The Great Terror, etc.

“Jay Nordlinger’s book is an authoritative and fair account of the most controversial of the Nobel prizes. Very readable, it sets the picture straight.”

Richard Pipes
Baird Professor of History, Emeritus, Harvard University

Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism

Robert Zubrin — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 19:00:02 +0000

There was a time when humanity looked in the mirror and saw something precious, worth protecting and fighting for—indeed, worth liberating. But now we are beset on all sides by propaganda promoting a radically different viewpoint. According to this idea, human beings are a cancer upon the Earth, a species whose aspirations and appetites are endangering the natural order. This is the core of antihumanism.

Merchants of Despair traces the pedigree of this ideology and exposes its deadly consequences in startling and horrifying detail. The book names the chief prophets and promoters of antihumanism over the last two centuries, from Thomas Malthus through Paul Ehrlich and Al Gore. It exposes the worst crimes perpetrated by the antihumanist movement, including eugenics campaigns in the United States and genocidal anti-development and population-control programs around the world.

Combining riveting tales from history with powerful policy arguments, Merchants of Despair provides scientific refutations to antihumanism’s major pseudo-scientific claims, including its modern tirades against nuclear power, pesticides, population growth, biotech foods, resource depletion, industrial development, and, most recently, fear-mongering about global warming. Merchants of Despair exposes this dangerous agenda and makes the definitive scientific and moral case against it.

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“Robert Zubrin’s masterful study…makes for riveting reading. Merchants of Despair is a cautionary tale of what happens when powerful, unprincipled elites are not only alienated from the mass of their fellow men, but come to see them as a barrier to imagined social, evolutionary, or environmental progress.”

Steven W. Mosher
President, Population Research Institute

“Merchants of Despair is an extraordinary and important book….This fascinating volume carefully traces developments of the Malthusian hypothesis right up to the present: through eugenics to population control and genocide; through the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth and extreme environmentalism to climate change and the myth of global warming apocalypse. Robert Zubrin has my nomination for a Pulitzer Prize.”

S. Fred Singer
Chairman, Science and Environmental Policy Project
Author of Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years

“I believe no one to date has so clearly explained the thread of the antihuman movement throughout history. To read this book is to become a warrior in the battle against it.”

Jay Lehr
Heartland Institute

“The most devastating account and refutation of antihuman environmentalism ever written.”

Gregory Benford
Author of Chiller

The Case for Polarized Politics: Why America Needs Social Conservatism

Jeffrey Bell — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 18:27:12 +0000

In recent decades social conservatism has become not only a core component of Republican election victories, but a defining characteristic by which Republicans know themselves and are known to others. Yet today, much of elite Republican opinion has turned hostile to a political role for social issues, preferring they be paid only lip service and removed from political debate whenever possible.

In The Case for Polarized Politics, Jeffrey Bell asserts that social conservatism is not only unlikely to collapse, but that it is has become an increasingly unified and coherent movement, one that reflects the dearly held beliefs of millions of Americans. The resulting polarization, unpleasant as it may be, is preferable to the alternative which is being played out in the declining societies of Western Europe and Japan, countries where there is no resistance to the left’s agenda of relentless cultural and social transformation. In the United States, by contrast, polarization reigns because social conservatives have proven impossible to marginalize. Social conservatives may be far from prevailing, but the battle over social issues continues to drive the national debate and its issues will always play a huge role in voters’ decisions. Both the left, and more importantly the right, attempt to marginalize it at their own peril.

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Obama’s Education Takeover

Lance T. Izumi — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 21:20:04 +0000

President Obama has laid the groundwork for an unprecedented centralization of education policy under the guise of promoting educational innovation, accountability, and improved student achievement. In reality, Obama’s new national standards, curricula, and testing—in addition to huge spending commitments by the federal government—shift the policymaking power from individuals and communities to the federal bureaucracy.

In this Broadside, Lance T. Izumi examines Obama’s education policies and shows us why Americans must protect and promote the power of individuals, especially parents, to control children’s education. We should look to the revolutionary school-choice and parental-empowerment laws passed by key states and other nations such as Canada. While Obama is pushing American education in the wrong direction, we can steer it back to local control.

The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America (Paperback)

Andrew C. McCarthy — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:22:34 +0000

The real threat to the United States is not terrorism. The real threat is the sophisticated forces of Islamism, which have collaborated with the American Left not only to undermine U.S. national security but to shred the fabric of American constitutional democracy—freedom and individual liberty. In The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, bestselling author Andrew C. McCarthy provides a harrowing account of how the global Islamist movement’s jihad involves far more than terrorist attacks, and how it has found the ideal partner in President Barack Obama, whose Islamist sympathies run deep.

McCarthy is the former federal prosecutor who convicted the notorious “Blind Sheikh” and other jihadists for waging a terrorist war that included the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In his national bestseller, Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter 2008), he explored government’s conscious avoidance of the terrorist threat, which made the nation vulnerable to mass-murder attacks. In The Grand Jihad he exposes a more insidious peril: government’s active suppression of the Islamist ideology that unabashedly vows to “conquer America.” With the help of witting and unwitting accomplices in and out of government, Islamism doesn’t merely fuel terrorism but spawns America-hating Islamic enclaves in our midst and gradually foists Islam’s repressive law, sharia, on American life. The revolutionary doctrine has made common cause with an ascendant Left that also seeks radical transformation of our constitutional order. The prognosis for liberty could not be more dire.

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“When prosecution rather than war was our means of fighting terrorism, Andy McCarthy was the tip of the spear. Now that we are at war, a new set of challenges besets us (including going back to prosecution as a means of fighting). And, once again, Andy McCarthy is the tip of the spear–in educating and warning us both about the threat from radical Islam and the dangers of our own fecklessness in fighting it. Everything Andy writes is must-reading, and must-heeding.”

William J. Bennett
Washington Fellow, The Claremont Institute; Radio Host

“The threats to our freedom and our security are not separate. For years, statists and Islamists have made common cause in a civilizational war. Their target is our Constitution and the culture of individual liberty that makes America, America. In The Grand Jihad, Andy McCarthy unveils this conspiracy like it’s never been exposed before. This is a clarion call from a fearless fighter for freedom. Read this book and you’ll understand what we’re up against and why we have to stop it.”

Mark R. Levin
Author of the Number One Bestseller Liberty & Tyranny; Radio Host

“Do you care about the survival of our country? Then you must read this book. The brilliant, brave, and stalwart Andy McCarthy exposes how our external Islamist enemies join with our internal Alinskyite enemies to destroy all that we hold dear. Every American must understand how the Grand Jihad of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Western civilization-undermining agenda of the Revolutionary Left operate in deadly sync. As McCarthy shows, this sabotage is taking place on our college campuses, in our courts, and with invaluable help from the enablers of the Obama White House. We must not submit.”

Michelle Malkin
Author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies

Why the West is Best: A Muslim Apostate’s Defense of Liberal Democracy

Ibn Warraq — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 18:01:20 +0000

We in the West in general, and in the United States in particular, have witnessed over the last twenty years a slow erosion of our civilizational self-confidence. Under the influence of intellectuals and academics like Susan Sontag and Noam Chomsky, and destructive fashions from postmodernism to multiculturalism, the West has lost all security in its own values, and is surprisingly incapable and unwilling to defend those values against aggressive challengers across the globe.

In Why the West Is Best, Ibn Warraq, an Islamic scholar and a leading figure in Koranic criticism, offers a frank and authoritative defense of the West from the outside looking in. Warraq examines the strengths and freedoms often taken for granted in the West and contrasts them with the stunning lack of freedoms in the majority of societies in the world, tackling taboo subjects of racism in Asian culture, Arab slavery, and Islamic Imperialism along the way.

As Andrew Jackson said, “Eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty, and that you must pay the price if you wish to secure the blessing.” With new trials at home and abroad, Why the West Is Best reasserts this vigilance, and tells us that the struggle for Western civilization is a fight we must win.