Howard Jones’s My Lai: Vietnam, 1968, and the Descent into Darkness Continues to Receive Positive Reviews

This image shows the book jacket for Jones's book, displaying the mangled corpses of Vietnamese civilians.
Howard Jones‘s My Lai: Vietnam, 1968, and the Descent into Darkness continues to garner high praise from critics.

Last November, New York Times book reviewer Thomas E. Ricks said that Jones’s work is “at once painful and useful,” adding that My Lia is “likely to become the standard reference work” on the subject. John Williams, the Daily Books Editor for the Times, has included My Lia in his list of “11 New Books We Recommend This Week.”

Just recently, the BBC’s Max Hastings, writing in the London Review of Books, called Jones’s work a “cool, comprehensive” and as thorough “account as we are ever likely to have of this defining act of military barbarism.”

Howard Jones is a University Research Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at The University of Alabama. He is the author of more than twelve books on US diplomatic history, including Mutiny on the AmistadUnion in Peril: The Crisis over British Intervention in the Civil WarDeath of a Generation: How the Assassinations of Diem and JFK Prolonged the Vietnam War; the Crucible of Power series, and The Bay of Pigs. His To the Webster-Ashburton Treaty: A Study in Anglo-American Relations, 1783-1843 was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in History and his Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations received an Honorable Mention for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize.