| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Inventing Vietnam: The United States and State Building, 1954–1968. By James M. Carter. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. viii, 268 pp. Cloth, $75.00, ISBN 978-0-521-88865-3. Paper, $22.99, ISBN 978-0-521-71690-1.)

Scholarly investigations of U.S. involvement in Vietnam continue to accumulate at a dizzying pace, adding depth, nuance, and interpretive range to an already-prodigious literature. Yet, surprisingly, especially given the sheer volume of that scholarship, few monographs have devoted more than cursory attention to a central feature of America's involvement: the bold attempt by the United States to create from whole cloth a modern state structure south of Vietnam's seventeenth parallel. That deeply flawed and ultimately doomed enterprise, which drew enormous energy and lavish expenditures, certainly warrants the systematic focus that James M. Carter gives it here. After all, the enterprise constituted, in his apt depiction, "one of the most thorough and ambitious state-building efforts in the postwar period" (p. 6).

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