In his August 25, 2014, New York Times column, Frank Bruni wrote about the climate of gloom and pessimism that pervades the United States, noting that visions of unbounded opportunities for advancement on an ever-expanding frontier now seem quaint. Only a few months earlier, his colleague at the Times, Paul Krugman, chided his fellow economists for their “addiction to the apocalypse,” their doomsday forecasting both exploiting and contributing to a national narrative running counter to the City on the Hill imagery in which the United States once cast itself. Scott Laderman and Edwin Martini’s edited volume Four Decades On: Vietnam, the United States, and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War is a sampler of essays on legacy topics, some of which are explored more broadly in the following books.
Four decades on: Vietnam, the United States, and the legacies of the Second Indochina War by