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pp. xi, (3), 719, “At the heart of David Halberstam’s massive and powerful new history of the Korean War is a bloody, losing battle fought in November 1950 in the snow-covered mountains of North Korea by outnumbered American GIs and Marines against the Chinese Communist Army. Halberstam’s villain is not North Korea’s Kim Il Sung or China’s Chairman Mao or even the Soviet Union’s Josef Stalin, who pulled the strings. It’s the legendary general Douglas MacArthur, the aging, arrogant, politically ambitious architect of what the author calls the single greatest American military miscalculation of the war, MacArthur’s decision to go all the way to the Yalu [River] because he was sure the Chinese would not come in. Much of the story is familiar. What distinguishes this version by Halberstam (who died this year in a California auto crash) is his reportorial skill, honed in Vietnam in Pulitzer-winning dispatches to the New York Times. His pounding narrative, in which GIs and generals describe their coldest winter, whisks the reader along, even though we know the ending. Most Korean War scholars agree that MacArthur’s sprint to the border of great China with a Siberian winter coming on resulted in a lethal nightmare.”