“No more Vietnams” is a credo of...

“No more Vietnams” is a credo of the collective American will in the ‘80s, but that intuitively appealing phrase is susceptible to two very different interpretations--doves invoke the phrase to caution against any new military adventure, and hawks use it to caution only against those which we lack the will to win. And, according to the editors of Vietnam and America: A Documented History (Grove: $11.95), the phrase has acquired at least one more meaning. “No more Vietnams also came to stand for the desire to expunge Vietnam from our memory,” write Marvin E. Gettleman, Jane Franklin, Marilyn Young and H. Bruce Franklin, the book’s editors. “To mention Vietnam was to call up horrors, shame, guilt, rage, and a bitterly divided America.”

“Vietnam and America,” then, is an insistent antidote to our collective forgetfulness about the war in Vietnam. It is a one-volume archive of source material, a reader in counterrevisionist history, a repository of documents that give real and urgent meaning to the American experience in Vietnam, all of it usefully introduced by the editors and explained by the contributing essayists. We read an 1885 edict from the emperor of Vietnam who called on his people to resist their French colonial overlords: “Perhaps with Heaven’s assistance, we shall be able to turn chaos into order, danger into peace, and finally retrieve our entire territory.” Vo Nguyen Giap, the architect of the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, explains “the general law of a long revolutionary war . . . the enemy’s strategic principle was to attack swiftly and win swiftly; our party set forth the guiding principle of a long-term Resistance War. . . . Time was needed to mobilize, to wear out the enemy forces, turning our weakness into strength.” And we read the almost poignant diplomatic pronouncements of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, by which decades of resistance--both here and in Vietnam--were ended by a single solemn phrase: “The United States will not continue its military involvement or intervene in the internal affairs of South Vietnam.”

The subtext of “Vietnam and America” is not only the futility but also what the editors see as the brutality, the corruption and the moral bankruptcy of our involvement in Vietnam. Their message is quite explicit: “Only an America persuaded that Vietnam was a ‘noble cause’ can take pride in invading small Caribbean islands,” the editors write. “And only an America that has erased the history of the Vietnam war can protect death squads that ritually mutilate and rape their victims.” Of course, the reader is free to draw his or her own conclusions from the raw material of history that is collected here. But “Vietnam and America” suffers from its refusal to acknowledge at least some glimmer of good intention, some expression of patriotism and even altruism, that may have entered into America’s efforts in Vietnam.

Earthquakes, the elements and the sheer velocity of urban growth have conspired to threaten--and, in many cases, to obliterate--the architectural heritage of the American West. The challenge of finding and saving what is left of that heritage is the theme of Preserving the West by Randolph Delahanty and E. Andrew McKinney (Pantheon: $17.95), a superb synthesis of text and photography that focuses on successful architectural preservation throughout the West. The scope of “Preserving the West” is as vast as the territory it covers--from Arizona and Nevada to Oregon and Washington, the authors have documented the salvation of Navajo forked-stick hogans, magnificent Spanish mission architecture, remnants of adobe construction that survive in the modern barrio, as well as the complex preservation efforts now being undertaken in San Diego, Santa Barbara and San Francisco. (The spotty record of preservation in Los Angeles does not escape their critical attention: “In the continuing battle . . . we see the dark side of the Southern California ethos: a crude utilitarianism that sees art as the private luxury of the rich rather than the civic right of society as a whole.”) But the book is mostly about the mechanics--and the rewards--of architectural preservation; Delahanty’s text concentrates on practical considerations of financing, planning, zoning and public policy, while McKinney’s evocative black-and-white photographs celebrate the sometimes subtle but enduring glory of these buildings.

“Oscar Wilde is probably remembered first and foremost as a great, almost legendary victim,” writes Martin Fido in Oscar Wilde: An Illustrated Biography (Peter Bedrick/Harper & Row: $9.95), an often chatty but always authoritative study of the life and times of the celebrated 19th-Century literary eccentric. “He spoke truly when he said that he had put his genius into his life, and only talent into his works. He unconsciously created in his life a perfect classical tragedy.” Fido favors the telling anecdote, the poignant detail--indeed, we learn more about the particulars of Wilde’s final agonies than we really need to know--and he succeeds in retelling century-old literary gossip with urgency, humor and compassion. Above all, Fido is a historian, and his biography of Wilde is especially compelling because it so vividly depicts the social and cultural hothouse in which Wilde lived.