Stanley Karnow

Author Karnow’s first book was his text for Southeast Asia (1962), a volume in his employer's illustrated, mass-market, Life World Library series. His first major publication was Mao and China: From Revolution to Revolution (1972), a 600-page analysis of the recent Cultural Revolution. The book built on Karnow's Hong Kong reporting on a then-isolated China and a fellowship year at Harvard, and was nominated for a National Book Award. Despite his place on Nixon's Enemies List, Karnow received an invitation to accompany Nixon on his historic visit to China in 1972, during which he sought to confirm the information in his manuscript.

In 1977, two years after the fall of Saigon, PBS suggested to Karnow a television series on the Vietnam War. He worked in tandem on the series and on what became a 750-page book, Vietnam: A History (1983). The titles reflected contemporary American usage, referring not to the centuries-old country but to the recent war. 90% of the book treated the years 1945-75, and called attention to the continuities between the French and American wars. The film was similarly focused, with only a brief prologue on prewar French colonialism and a final hour on post-1975 "legacies". Both were very successful, reaching large parts of the American public at a time when interest in the war was reviving after nearly a decade of forgetting. Like the conflict itself, the book and film were controversial and helped spark the ongoing public debate on the history and meaning of the war.

Rising political unrest in the Philippines in the 1980s, culminating in the fall of the 20-year regime of President Ferdinand Marcos, prompted Karnow's second book and television project. The book, In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines (1989), won a Pulitzer Prize for History. Karnow was chief correspondent and narrator for the companion three-part PBS television documentary, The U.S. and the Philippines: In Our Image.

Asian Americans in Transition, a report for the Asia Society, appeared in 1992. Half of the chapters were authored by Karnow and half by Nancy Yoshihara, co-founder of the Asian American Journalists Association. The report focused on the characteristics and challenges of Asian immigrants, whose numbers had swelled since the 1960s. Karnow immediately began work on a book on the Asian experience in the United States, but ultimately decided that an Asian was more suited for the job. in Brooklyn on February 4, 1925, the son of Harry and Henriette Koeppel Karnow (Karnofsky). In 1947, he married Claude Sarraute, then a stage actress from a French literary family, who soon began her own career as a journalist. They divorced in 1955. Annette Karnow died of cancer in July 2009. The offspring had careers as, respectively, a travel photographer, television writer/producer, and a Judge.

Karnow died on January 27, 2013, at his home in Potomac, Maryland, at age 87 of congestive heart failure.

Works

(Preface) The First Time I Saw Paris: Photographs and Memories from the City of Light, Times Books, 1999.