Books about Indochina from Amazon.com

Starring Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser, The Quiet American is already gaining incredible buzz -- including a Golden Globe nomination for Caine (Best Actor, Drama). This enchanting film is directed by Phillip Noyce (Rabbit-Proof Fence; The Bone Collector; Clear and Present Danger) and is adapted from one of Graham Greene’s best-loved novels. Into the intrigue and violence of Indo-China comes Pyle, a young idealistic American sent to promote democracy through a mysterious “Third Force.” As his naïve optimism starts to cause bloodshed, his friend Fowler, a cynical foreign correspondent, finds it hard to stand aside and watch. But even as he intervenes he wonders why: for the sake of politics, or for love..
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"This incredible story, which plunges us immediately into the bloodiest aspects of the war, is also a suspenseful autobiography that will keep you chewing your fingernails to see if Van Devanter survives any of it at all. She proves herself a natural storyteller. . . . The most extraordinary part in this book is Van Devanter's plight after the war-her attempt to retrieve the love of her family, only to realize they don't want to see her slides, hear her stories; her assignment to menial duties at Walter Reed Army Hospital. . . . How Van Devanter survives all of this to become, incredibly, a stronger person for it is what makes her book so riveting."-San Francisco Chronicle

"An awesome, painfully honest look at war through a woman's eyes. Her letters home and startling images of life in a combat zone-surgeons fighting to save a Vietnamese baby wounded in utero, the ever-present stench of napalm-charred flesh, a beloved priest's gentle humor and appalling death, the casual heroism of her colleagues, a Vietnamese 'Papa-san' trying to talk his dead child back to life, a haunting snapshot dropped by a dying soldier with no face-tell the story of a young American's rude initiation to the best and the worst of humanity."-Washington Post

"Moving, powerful . . . a healing book."-Ms. Magazine

"This book reads like a diary: unguarded, heartfelt. . . . [It] is both moving and valu-able, for reminding us so vividly that war is indeed hell . . . and that its most tested heroes are the doctors and nurses who doggedly labor not just to save life, but also to keep their respect for it, even as their surviving patients are sent out, once more, unto the breach."-Harper's Magazine

"In Vietnam, reality hit fast: Van Devanter's plane was fired on when it landed in Saigon; and after three days of adjustment, she was assigned to the 71st Evacuation Hospital, a 'MASH-type facility' near the Cambodian border. There, the casualties, . . . the personal danger, the fatigue, the heat, rain, and mud, the harassment of officers enforcing petty regulations, and above all the meaninglessness of American involvement rapidly put an end to Van Devanter's blind patriotism, her innocence, and her youth. . . . Van Devanter brings us face to face with the toll that undeclared war took on its combatants."-Kirkus Reviews

"If you read only one work about Vietnam, make this the one. . . . This is the way it was, as seen through the eyes of an army second lieutenant when she was twenty-two. I believe her completely, because this reviewer remembers Vietnam the same way, when he was a nineteen-year-old Marine PFC."-Deseret Sentinel.
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Originally published in 1961, before the United States escalated its involvement in South Vietnam, Street without Joy offered a clear warning about what American forces would face in the jungles of Southeast Asia: a costly and protracted revolutionary war fought without fronts against a mobile enemy. In harrowing detail, Fall describes the brutality and frustrations of the Indochina War, the savage eight-year conflict-ending in 1954 after the fall of Dien Bien Phu-in which French forces suffered a staggering defeat at the hands of Communist-led Vietnamese nationalists. With its frontline perspective, vivid reporting, and careful analysis, Street without Joy was required reading for policymakers in Washington and GIs in the field and is now considered a classic..
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"A few years ago," Stewart O'Nan, editor of The Vietnam Reader, writes in his introduction, "when I began teaching the American literature of the Vietnam War, I tried to find an anthology my students could use.... But as I searched through libraries and catalogues, new- and used-book shops, I discovered there wasn't one." So O'Nan set out to create one himself. What began as course material has grown into a remarkable collection of writing that will appeal to a broad audience of readers interested in the Vietnam experience. O'Nan includes a little bit of everything--fiction and nonfiction from acclaimed writers such as Tim O'Brien, Louise Erdrich, Michael Herr, and David Halberstam; poetry and drama by Michael Casey and David Rabe; even songs such as Barry Sadler's "The Ballad of the Green Berets" and Credence Clearwater Revival's "Fortunate Son." There are also essays on the major Vietnam films, from The Deer Hunter to Full Metal Jacket, and a smattering of famous photographs from the war.

What makes this collection extraordinary is not just the quality of the writing it contains but also the breadth of attitudes O'Nan represents. For instance, he juxtaposes an excerpt from Ron Kovic's antiwar memoir, Born of the Fourth of July with James Webb's gung-ho paean to fighting the good fight in Fields of Fire. Chapters of Tim O'Brien's hallucinatory fiction Going After Cacciato resonate with excerpts from his earlier memoir If I D ie in a Combat Zone as well the journalism of Michael Herr (Dispatches) and Philip Caputo (A Rumor of War). Creating sections such as "Early Work," "The Oral History Boom," "Memoirs," "Homecoming," and more, O'Nan seeks to convey as much of the war experience from as many different perspectives as possible. Anyone interested in history and in fine writing will find The Vietnam Reader worthy reading. --Alix Wilber.
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This supplementary book provides a history of the Vietnam War from the perspective of North Vietnam Professor Duiker is one of the English speaking world's foremost authorities on this period of Vietnamese history and is a former foreign service officer posted in Vietnam. Based on recent scholarship and evidence, this book includes Vietnamese documents and research available to very few scholars. Quotes are sprinkled throughout the book to show how the Vietnamese felt about the events that were taking place around them, and why they decided to behave the way they did. Written for the general reader, this lively account of "the other side" includes distinctive photographs and sources..
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Peter Dale Scott's brilliantly researched tour de force illuminates the underlying forces that drive U.S. global policy from Vietnam to Colombia and now to Afghanistan and Iraq. He brings to light the intertwined patterns of drugs, oil politics, and intelligence networks that have been so central to the larger workings of U.S. intervention and escalation in Third World countries through al liances with drug-trafficking proxies. The result has been a staggering increase in global drug traffic. Thus, the author argues, the exercise of power by cover t means, or parapolitics, often metastasizes into deep politics - the interplay of unacknowledged forces that spin out of the control of the original policy ini tiators. Scott contends that we must recognize that U.S. influence is grounded n ot just in military and economic superiority but also in so-called soft power. W e need a soft politics of persuasion and nonviolence, especially as America is e mbroiled in yet another disastrous intervention, this time in Iraq..
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