"A sense of pure, distilled fury animates...
An Honorable Exit, translated into an English of bladelike beauty by Mark Polizzotti...a work of ferocious reckoning, revealing the people who made the decisions and the reasons that drove them." –
Wall Street Journal "With measured outrage and penetrating irony, [Vuillard] pillories the alternating bluster and euphemism of French decision-makers while emphasizing colonialism's brutal toll on the Vietnamese." –
The New Yorker "Vuillard has drawn on [a] background of protestation and distrust of power structures to produce a succession of short, biting historical narratives, distinguished by a tone of ironic exasperation...[He] writes into gray areas of history that have rarely received narrative prominence." –
New York Times Book Review "Excoriating and profound...a remarkable work." –
The Scotsman "An impassioned and impressionistic indictment of the cruelty and hubris that sparked the First Indochina War...delivers a powerful anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist message." –
Publishers Weekly "For the men who led the Third Republic, France's humiliating departure from Indochina was a defeat foretold. In prose that is both spare and searing, Éric Vuillard depicts the politicians, bankers, and military commanders who waged a war they knew was lost. Hundreds of thousands of Asian and African lives were sacrificed not on behalf of a failed bid for victory, but in craven efforts to preserve elite reputations and wealth in the name of 'honor.' A tour de force." –Edward Miller, author of
Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam Praise for
The Order of the Day "Vuillard's writing is spare, angry and powerful...a chilling, brilliant look at the rise of fascism in the 1930s that also works as a warning for today." –NPR, Best Books of the Year
"Gripping...a tour de force...this unusual work...peel[s] away the veils of dissimulation, disguise and self-justification that conspire to make historical disasters appear as just the way things happen." –
Wall Street Journal
"[A] remarkable account...It captures the bizarre blend of wishful thinking, clownish self-importance, and cold calculation that characterized many of the Nazis' powerful enablers." –
The New Yorker
