James Bradley journeyed to Iwo Jima and returned with Flags of Our Fathers and now ventures to Vietnam and brings us Precious Freedom, where he reveals that, if we’d known what happened in the 1960s in Vietnam, American mothers would never have sent their children to Iraq and Afghanistan. The truth is the best vaccination against great lies.

This is James Bradley doing what he does best. Diving in and talking to veterans, asking the hardest questions about the Vietnam War, and looking for actual answers. Precious Freedom is a David and Goliath story . . . and proof of the power of the ordinary person.

If you have spent time with US veterans of the Vietnam War and with Vietnamese citizens who lived through it, and took part in it, you will immediately recognize in these pages the enormous nuance and complexity of that time in both countries’ histories. It’s likely in your daily routine that you meet someone who fought in Vietnam, and it’s almost guaranteed that they are still thinking of those days, the terror and camaraderie. At the same time, we struggle to find a way to talk about it. That’s where James Bradley comes in. Precious Freedom is an engrossing, highly-researched and essential part of this complex conversation. We undertake a new journey with James Bradley: he takes us inside the lives of the people, culture, and aspirations of the Vietnamese people who met on the battlefields with the older men you see today in the grocery stores, the coffee shops, at high school graduations. If we are to understand the experiences of these two countries, and to honor them, we must see they are inextricably bound. Bradley brings this relationship to dramatic light in a way we cannot forget or put down. Read this book for yourself, for the veterans of any conflict, and for the Vietnamese people who have become some of America’s steadfast allies, just as they had predicted they might be. Precious Freedom is an important and poignant homecoming of many, many kinds.

The world knows that Vietnam defeated the United States in a long war, but how did Vietnam accomplish that astonishing feat?  James Bradley has come up with a magnificently rich and deeply researched answer.  His book teaches us much about the war and about Vietnam, but most of all about the United States and why it embarks on such devastating misadventures.

James Bradley has produced another triumph. Anyone who has spent time talking with veterans and survivors of the American War in Vietnam will instantly recognize the people in this book.  Precious Freedom offers a window onto the obscenity of the conflict and the episodes of courage and grace that nonetheless punctuated it. It’s a complex story told in a compelling and furiously honest fashion.  If you think you’ve already read all the great Vietnam War novels, think again.

James Bradley’s revelatory account of how the Vietnamese people defeated a better armed, better funded fighting force backed up by the richest country in the world offers an object lesson in why so-called advanced technology and vast expenditures are no match for superior morale, smart strategy, deep local knowledge, society-wide commitment and unity of purpose. . . . The stories Bradley conveys offer a cautionary tale about the dangers of an approach based on technological hubris and misplaced faith in the power and effectiveness of military intervention, divorced from an understanding of local conditions. War is a human endeavor, and Bradley captures that truth in compelling detail.

James Bradley is in top form with Precious Freedom, displaying his gift for making complex subjects understandable.  Precious Freedom is the place to start if you haven’t read about the Vietnam War and if you're familiar with the genre, it will add significantly to your understanding.

For more than sixty years, Americans have looked at Vietnam through the wrong end of a telescope. Precious Freedom turns it around, bringing into sharp focus Vietnamese people who lived and died in the Pentagon’s gunsights. James Bradley’s profound novel illuminates the resilient spirit of Vietnam’s people and the historic aggression of America’s warfare state.

Precious Freedom is an extremely important book that counters the distorted revisionism about the Vietnam War prevalent in the US, presenting the US cause as a noble one, and America’s South Vietnamese allies as heroic. Bradley is a gifted story-teller and writer who gives voice to the Vietnamese people who successfully stood up to defend their country against brutal foreign invaders, backed by local collaborators. Drawing on dozens of interviews, including with aides to Ho Chi Minh, North Vietnamese army generals, and southern-based National Liberation Front (NLF) fighters, along with American Marines, Bradley explains how and why Vietnam won the Vietnam War, and how and why the US lost. Important lessons can be drawn from this history that sheds light on the barbarism and folly underlying US foreign policy in the Cold War.

If we had truly understood what happened in Vietnam, no American would have let their children march off to Iraq or Afghanistan. Precious Freedom exposes the buried lessons of war, showing how forgotten history paves the road to repeated tragedy.

Like James Bradley, I have travelled to Vietnam and shared memories, food, laughter, and tears with these remarkable people and some of their leaders.  Remarkable because as Americans invaded their land, killed five million people, raped their women, destroyed their triple canopy forests with chemical weapons, and dropped more bombs on their tiny country than were dropped by all sides in World War II--through it all Ho Chi Minh taught his people to feel sorry for American troops, to understand the American mothers' sorrows and, above all, not to let corrosive hate enter their being.  Ho taught that neither the Vietnamese or American people wanted war, but Cold War-addled US leaders got in the way. Today in Vietnam we Americans are forgiven and accepted.  After besting the Mongols, Chinese, French, Japanese and Americans, Vietnam cannot afford to hate much of the world and they don't.  I found their spirit of resistance inspiring and I am humbled by Vietnamese forgiveness, which James Bradley brings out so poignantly in Precious Freedom.

The backstory to one of the world’s most important relationships – the United States and China.

Bradley explores America’s perception of Asia – as it was shaped by callow policymakers and self-appointed sachems – and the gap between that perception and reality: the received wisdom, hopeful hogwash, and accumulated misunderstandings that led to three major Asian War (and a few minor ones) …. FDR’s East Asia policy is a story as complex as a Fabergé egg, that Bradley handles with aplomb … Bradley is sharp and rueful, and a voice for a more seasoned, constructive visions of our international relations with East Asia.

A vivid, bracing, and careful study …. There are lessons to be learned about war and peace, and Bradley’s valuable book offers a warning about past and future unnecessary entanglements.

Well worth a read …. The new book covers, better than I’ve seen anywhere else, the history of how many of the wealthiest individuals and institutions of the East Coast United States in the nineteenth century got their money – including Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s grandfather’s money – by illegally selling opium in China … For the full account, I recommend Bradley’s book.

Bradley has produced another gripping historical account with ramifications for today’s world.

Bradley argues that a better understanding of China could have helped America to avoid war with Japan in 1941 and subsequent wars in Korea and Vietnam. Verdict: A superlative read that is highly recommended to experts and novices alike.

Bradley...argues that this positive, pre-WWII view of China was false and led the US into several policy errors, including the needless provocation of Japan... Bradley's work is insightful and entertaining.

Uncovers the nineteenth-century plan to create a 'New China' and 'Americanize Asia'...In this relentless critique of wrongheaded thinking by government officials who did not speak the Asian languages and had little hands-on experience, Bradley focuses especially on the foreign policy of the two Roosevelts ... Bradley delivers a strenuous expose about the initial building of the 'rickety bridge of fellowship crossing the Pacific.

Mr. Bradley does not simply cite Roosevelt’s egregious talk. He presents this much-ignored aspect of Roosevelt’s thinking with sharp specificity and then goes on to make a much more damaging point, angrily and persuasively connecting Roosevelt’s race-based foreign policy miscalculations in Asia. His these in The Imperial Cruise is startling enough to reshape conventional wisdom about Roosevelt’s presidency.

A provocative study … What is fascinating about Bradley’s reconstruction of a largely neglected aspect of Theodore Roosevelt’s legacy is the impact that his racial theories and his obsession with personal and national virility had on his diplomacy. Engrossing and revelatory, The Imperial Cruise is revisionist history at its best.

This is a book to admire and, it must be said, to enjoy … The Imperial Cruise is breezy and engaging … The heart of the Bradley argument is that Roosevelt’s forgotten corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, the one that warned the Old World that the United States, and not European nations, would intervene if Western Hemisphere nations had unstable economics and owed large debts, emboldened Japan to become an aggressor nation in the run-up to World War II.

A page-turner … eye-opening.

The Imperial Cruise is an important contribution to a realistic understanding of America’s history, good and bd, and the views that other cultures, particularly in Asia hold toward the United States. It also serves as a powerful reminder that the course we choose today is influenced by choices made long before, and will have its own influence, for good and ill, in the world that comes after us. We ignore such lessons at our own peril.

Bradley’s critique of Rooseveltian imperialism is compelling.

In Flyboys, James Bradley combines his tenacious detective skills with his gifts as a master storyteller to produce a tragic epic of two empires. I wept not only for the American pilots, but for all the millions of people who died needlessly in the Pacific War.

Bradley has written a clear-eyed, heartfelt approach to a little-known corner of the 20th century’s largest and most violent upheaval, while at the same time shining a light on some of that generation’s finest.

Flyboys, the heartbreaking and horrifying saga of eight American airmen who went down during bombing runs over the Pacific, is the result of Bradley’s courage in putting a face on wartime atrocities … Bradley does a commendable job of setting the bloody events on Chichi Jima within a historical framework that helps to explain both the American and Japanese thirst for blood in wartime … Perhaps that is the real value of Flyboys: to tell a story so unspeakable, so unimaginable, that we will remember it and try to ensure it does not happen again.

Flyboys is not just a true story of courage but a frightening reminder of the savagery human beings are capable of and of the terrible moral choices nations at war must make

Bradley tackles head-on the thorny issues of Japan’s wartime villainy and America’s problematic response … A gripping story.

Bradley did a tremendous amount of research, interviewing survivors and their families. And he’s done an excellent job of presenting the fruits of his labor. Flyboys is a well-done history of combat in the Pacific theater. But, most of all, it is a disturbing account of the depths to which human beings can sink.

Here is a book, brilliantly ambivalent, that draws us in with its directness and stuns us with its brutality.

An unforgettable story about eight forgotten World War II flyers and a ninth who became the 41st president of the United States. Heroism and the horrors of war collide over the South Pacific, and Bradley weaves a compelling tale. Like his previous work … Flyboys will be a part of the historical record for years to come.

A powerful, compelling look at a tragic time in our history.

Unforgettable … one of the most instructive and moving books on war and its aftermath that we are likely see.

The best battle book I ever read … These stories, chronicling the time the six men who raised the flag at Iwo Jima enlisted, their training, and the landing and subsequent struggle, fill me with awe.

A powerful book whose vivid and horrific images do not easily leave the mind … [Flags of Our Fathers] relates the brutalizing story of Iwo Jima with a fine eye for both the strategic imperative and the telling incident.

Brings a heartfelt personal dimension to this penetrating and insightful look at an American icon … Flags of Our Fathers captivates as the story behind a famous photo; a story that lives on in a son’s heart.

Graphically, horrifically, and heroically told … Not only a gripping true story but also an inspirational book, a tale about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.

Bradley’s gripping narrative, vivid descriptions, and heartfelt style make this a powerful story of courage, humility, and tragedy … The book packs both a literary and historical punch … Highly recommended.