Vietnam has been America's most controversial and analysed war. It was not only an unwanted war in hindsight, it was also unnecessary in the context of its time. It was also a chosen hubris -- as Frederik Longevall calls it "Mr Johnson's War". The book is an outright indictment of John F Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, and McGeorge Bundy. More than 50,000 American lives were lost. Some 3-4 million Vietnamese perished in the war. More than a hundred billion dollars were wasted.

Could such a tragedy and profligacy been averted? Yes, says Longevall, as he recounts "The Long 1964", the 18-month period from August 1963 to February 1965. It is not a foregone after-the-event-even-a-fool-being-wise syndrome. Between late August 1963 when Kennedy decided to support the overthrow of the Diem/Nhu regime to February 1965 when Johnson enforced the "Rolling Thunder" and despatched Marines to protect Danang, opportunities to negotiate a peaceful settlement were squandered with Kennedy and Johnson being obsessed with the apprehension of being seen as going soft on Communism. Hence, the pyrrhic exercise in egomania. It was hawkish arrogance that lay rooted deep in morbid insecurity.

The widespread belief is that it was a reluctant JFK who propelled thousands of US advisors to Vietnam only to contemplate downplaying US involvement before his assassination. Johnson on the other hand, it is believed, wanted to wage a war against poverty and not Vietnam. It is only because of the uncompromising stand of North Vietnam and pressure from allies that he had to perforce escalate the conflict. Nothing could be more wrong, argues Longevall, as he delves into archives to drive home his contention.

During "The Long 1964", which takes up a bulk of the 400-odd pages, peace offers came from North Vietnam, South Vietnam, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and also the United Nations. Both Kennedy and Johnson chose not to tread the path to peace. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Defence Secretary Robert McNamara, and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy chipped in with their arguments. JFK and LBJ were more concerned with the outcome of the 1964 presidential elections. They did not want to be perceived as going soft on the commies. The war was Americanised.

As Longevall insists both America's allies as well as its enemies understood that "the Vietnam conflict's importance derived in large measure from its potential to threaten their own political standing--and their party's standing -- at home." The turning point was not the set of decision of the Harry Truman administration to permit the French to return to Vietnam or, later, to champion their war cause. It was also not the Dwight Eisenhower regime's move to discard the Geneva settlement and lend its shoulder to Ngo Dinh Diem after 1954. It was not the November 1963 assassination of Diem either. North Vietnam was willing to accept a neutralised South Vietnam in order to avoid American intervention. The Soviet Union and China were ready to make things easy.

Of the "Awesome Foursome of Johnson, Rusk, McNamara, and Bundy, the responsibility of escalating the war lies with the former. The author writes, "Johnson, no one else, ensured that the critical decisions on Vietnam were made by a small and insular group of individuals who by the latter part of 1964 had been involved in policy making for several years in most cases, who had overseen the steady expansion in the U.S. commitment to the war, and who had a large personal stake in seeing that commitment succeed."

The early enthusiasts of the green revolution pinned their hopes on beating the population spectre by making food more plentiful than before with the help of the new technology. It is to the great credit of the early critics that they broke out of this availability-focused approach. They realised that increased food availability per se would not necessarily help the poor, and focused rightly on the effect of the new technology on the entitlement of the poor. This paper has argued that although their methodological approach was fundamentally correct, they reached unduly pessimistic conclusions because their analysis of the entitlement effects was largely inadequate. A more careful analysis shows that the green revolution has beneficial effects on the entitlements of all categories of the poor, and the accumulated body of evidence from rural Asia supports this conclusion.

The critics of the green revolution also recognised quite early in the day that public policy must play an important mediating role if the poor are to benefit from new technology. The underlying idea was that the existing economic and social structure made it difficult for the poor to gain from the growth process unless their disadvantages were offset or at least mitigated by supportive public policy. That is why the critics insisted on land reform as a means of ensuring a level playing field, so to speak. In retrospect, many of them are seen to have been wrong in taking the extreme view that without land reform nothing else would help the poor. But the underlying perception that supportive public policy will be necessary if the benefits of growth are to reach the poor has stood the test if time.

While precious little has been done in implementing land reform in most Asian countries (the notable exceptions are Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and West Bengal in India), a good deal has been achieved in respect of other support policies. Development of irrigation facilities and making water available at subsidised prices was the crucial first step. Then fertiliser was made affordable through a policy of heavy subsidisation, and the availability of credit was expanded many times. The state also supported adaptive research for developing new varieties suitable for wide adoption within specific agroclimatic regions. Without these policies, it is very likely that small-scale farmers would have failed to overcome the initial lag in adoption, and the critics' worst fears would have come true.

The lesson is thus clear. There are policies, other than land and asset redistribution, that can make a difference, and they have made a difference in enabling the poor to share in the benefits of the green revolution. The reason why the potential benefits to the poor do not add up to a substantial reduction in poverty in some countries is that output growth has not been strong enough to counter the immiserising pressure of population growth.

The green revolution literature of the past 3 decades has been almost entirely obsessed with the question of whether or not growth has led to greater inequality and poverty. Perhaps the time has come to spend more effort in exploring the other question of why growth has been too slow in the first place.

Works on histories of history have to tread the razor's edge between Scylla and Charybdis. If they do not, then they either become monotonous exertions of enyclopaedic documentation, or self-indulgent analytical ramblings. Donald Kelley steers clear of the twin perils and presents a sequel to his acclaimed "Version of History from Antiquity to the Enlightenment" that is both expansive as well as inquisitive. The reason Kelley is able to remain objective is his intentions are clear: "The essential purpose of this book is to present a critical survey and interpretation of the Western tradition of historical inquiry and writing from Herodotus and Thucydides down to the masterworks of the eighteenth century and the beginning of 'scientific history' in the nineteenth."

Kelley starts off with "Mythistory," where he takes on Herodotus and Thucydides. Herodotus' concept of history was a generalised antiquarian convention that focused on the diversity of human experience. Thucydides was more concerned with events of political and military history, and questions of material interest, agency and power and the causal elements underlying the events themselves. For Herodotus, history was a broad, open-ended field of human inquiry, while Thucydides conceived it as a circumscribed series of events, with spatial and temporal limitations that could be explained and even controlled. The "Two Faces" (narrative vs analytical) thread runs throughout the book.

In his odyssey through Western historiography, Kelley cautions readers against not observing the significance of context in reporting and interpreting history, and calls for a strategy for study of problems, not periods. The other feature that is intrinsic to all the chapters is the very concept of history: "scope," "method," and "purpose" of history. "Scope" deals with subject matter, chronology, geography and historical evidence; "method" involves the means of gathering information, making sense of it, and transmitting it to a reading public; and "purpose" relates to claims regarding the utility of history.

Converting documentation to history is onerous. Aristotle denied history the very ascription of science: "Poetry is more scientific than history, because history is a mere collection of empirical facts, whereas poetry extracts from such facts a universal judgment." Kelley says Plutarch rejected the methodology of Herodotus and Thucydides, while Polybius imbibed from both. Roman history began with Livy, who provided the archetype of national history -- the origins of the city.

While the medieval writers reflected a universal interest in the past and were particularly concerned with "beginnings," Kelley argues that The interest of medieval historians like Bede and Otto of Freising in the past was richer and more diverse than the conventions established by Herodotus, Thucydides and their Greek and Latin progeny. For Judaism and Christianity, the purpose of history was to find a higher spiritual message behind the letter of the human record: history was to be "The Education of the Human Race."

During the Renaissance, Petrarch, not a historian per se, introduced the concept of periodisation in history-writing, while the Reformist trend trend of rewriting history had as much to do with the desire of England, France, Germany and Spain to break free Rome as it had to with Martin Luther's war against orthodoxy. The art of history gradually transformed into the science of history in the sixteenth century when there was a growing tendency to raise history above the arts by developing a systematic method oriented toward universals rather than particulars.

Enlightenment history took on different meanings based on national prejudices. For the French like Voltaire the history of war and politics mattered little, what did was the progress of science and the human spirit. The point was not to understand the world, but to improve it. If theology took the upper hand in Germany, in France and England the study of history was associated with law and jurisprudence. Kelley ends where most modern historiographical writings begin: with the birth of historicism. Kelley defines historicism as a way of "characterising the cast of mind that carries on historical inquiry in the spirit of especially Herodotus, that is, the art of asking perhaps naive (if not objective) questions about human behaviour in time".

The Blue Bedspread is Raj Kamal Jha's first book, a collection of multiple stories, vignettes and personal essays strung together around the artificially created peg of his Sister's one-day old child, sleeping in the room next door, covered by a blue bedspread that had also been used by the protagonist, the Brother and his Sister, when they were young.

Bedspread deals with the lives of the Brother, his Sister and their Father with multiple characters flitting in and out at different intervals. Through these multiple "stories", the reader eventually learns about the Family, but it takes a hell of a time for one to get there. Most characters are expectedly morbid. They either drink or beat their wives or kill their husbands or fight or have horrible mothers-in-law and in general, live terrible lives. Many of the pieces, like "Cable Television" or the piece on the American Centre Library, are just rants and personal Times of India middle essays, describing facets of life in modern day Calcutta. These only help to break the pace of the "story", if there could be said to be one in the first place.

As seems to be the norm with many modern Indian English novels, the stories keep jumping in time randomly. This provided one with considerable mental and physical exercise; mental exercise while trying to figure out the time periods the author was referring to, and physical exercise for page-turning fingers, as one had to go back and forth to understand what was happening. An entire piece titled "Durga Pooja", in the "Sister" section is so devious that one understood who was who and what was what, only another 20 pages down the line.

And the hang-loose parts. Incest between the Brother and Sister is introduced, but never really further explored. Pederasty between the Father and the Brother is talked about and then forgotten. Or maybe all these are just ways in which to pack in as many "hot topics" as possible to make the book interesting and saleable.

Why was the book written! Was it because he wanted to write something, anything! There is no doubt that Jha writes well and has a flair for words. But just as the ability to rhyme well does not a poet make, a flair for words does not necessarily an author make. Or maybe Jha just wanted to write; and to find an audience for his rants and peeves, he found some props on which to hang the stories and voila, the book was ready. And then he had Pankaj Mishra, the person who discovered Arundhati Roy to recommend his book and with a 6-figure dollar advance, what more could one ask for!

The problem with trying to read books like this is that unless one can get into the author's head there is no way to know what exactly he/she wants to say. One sometimes thinks it is better to stick with the Harry Potter books than to read modern Indian English novels that try to say a lot allegorically, hoping that the reader will make the jump between the words and the author's mind. What does Jha want to convey with the "Sarajevo woman"? Why is she in the book? At least with the "old man who cleans the pigeons", he is trying to make a point about the way the city is moving. But the "man with the cable TV who beats his wife" falling in love with the "Sarajevo woman" makes no sense.

Or maybe one is biased, because one prefers a good beginning, a nice middle and understandable endings with a proper flow.