The Magic of the Mekong

Julie Sarasin (Photographer)

This is a 5000-kilometre photographic odyssey along one of the world's greatest rivers, stretching from the plateau of Tibet to the South China Sea. The author shares with readers her experiences of the extremes of acommodation, weather and environment and the physical demands of travelling in the region. Two hundred and thirty colour photographs capture the diverse panorama of life in six nations.

Culture Shock! Vietnam

Claire Ellis

A look at the customs, etiquette, culture and traditions of Vietnam for those visiting the country. A new title from the CULTURE SHOCK! series.

Red Lights and Green Lizards: a Cambodian adventure

Liz Anderson

Having spent several months in Cambodia I wanted to read an up to date account of other peoples' experiences in this fascinating country. I was most pleased to find this book: an account of a doctor couple's two year period as volunteers with VSO in the early 90s. Most other literature on Cambodia relates to the Pol Pot regime and the immediate aftermath. Liz Anderson, a GP, and her gynecologist husband were not quite ready to retire and wanted a change for their last few years as practising doctors. So they contacted VSO and were offered a two year placement in Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh. The book follows the author's experiences of her time as a doctor in PP, and recounts the highs and the lows experienced. From the day she started right up until their leaving party it's all chronicled and well-written. It also includes an excellent chapter on the rise and fall of the Khmer Rouge explaining the main points well without going into too much political detail. Very easy to understand! The book was sad, amusing and most informative and left me feeling very envious of the Andersons, as they achieved so much in terms of friendships with fellow expats, colleagues, locals and patients, and their achievements as doctors were amazing, yet the author was most modest about them. I would recommend this book to anyone and is a must if you are interested in the Cambodian way of life, or you're interested in being an overseas volunteer whether or not be in the field of medicine. A most refreshing change from the usual tourist guidebook and the Khmer Rouge era of the late 70's. (Steve Simmons)

River of Time

John Swain

Between 1970 and 1975 Jon Swain, the English journalist portrayed in David Puttnam's film, "The Killing Fields", lived in the lands of the Mekong river. This is his account of those years, and the way in which the tumultuous events affected his perceptions of life and death as Europe never could. He also describes the beauty of the Mekong landscape - the villages along its banks, surrounded by mangoes, bananas and coconuts, and the exquisite women, the odours of opium, and the region's other face - that of violence and corruption.

Three moons in Vietnam: A Haphazard Journey by Boat and Bicycle

Maria Coffey

Having lived and worked in Vietnam, then travelled the length of the country I was drawn to this book to see if it reflected my own experiences. Maria Coffey and here husband did their travelling the hard way, by boat with locals and cycling up, and along, the hazardous highways. The text is rich in the sights, sounds and smells of the country and its people and provided me with a potent reminder of my days in the country. (Richard Marron)

Vietnam Blues

Music and Songs of Minorities, Vietnam

Tales from Vietnam

Traditional music of Vietnam

Music of Vietnam - vol.1

Good Morning Vietnam

After several flops, Good Morning, Vietnam was the movie that turned Robin Williams from the popular alien of TV's Mork and Mindy into a cinema superstar. Applying a comic touch to the Vietnam conflict in the tradition of M*A*S*H and its treatment of the Korean War, the movie capitalised on Williams's fast-talking improvisation and mimicry by casting him as a madcap DJ. In a novel twist which predates Reservoir Dogs soundtrack dialogue extracts by five years, the album is presented as an Adrian Cronauer radio show, mixing seven clips of Williams's brilliant monologues with a dozen classic tracks which collectively define the era. From "Nowhere To Run" by Martha Reeves & the Vandellas, through Beach Boys' "The Warmth Of The Sun" and "I Get Around", "Sugar And Spice" by The Searchers and "Game Of Love" by Wayne Fontana & The Mindbenders, 60s pop was rarely better than this.

The Sorrow of War

Bao Ninh

This is the semi-autobiographical account of a soldier's experiences. The hero of the story, Kien, is a captain. After 10 years of war and months as an MIA body-collector, Kien suffers a nervous breakdown in Hanoi as he tries to re-establish a relationship with his former sweetheart.

Music through the dark

Bree Lafreniere

A record of the Cambodian soul, taking readers into the heart of a horrifying tragedy - one that claimed the lives of Daran Kravanh's parents and seven siblings and as many as three million other Cambodians. Daran's talent for playing the accordion saved his own life.

The Quiet American

Graham Greene

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 naive optimism starts to cause bloodshed, his friend Fowler, a cynical foreign correspondent, finds it hard to stand aside and watch.

Novel without a name

Duong Thu Huong

In 1991, after sending abroad a manuscript of her Novel Without a Name - the first novel by a northern veteran to chronicle wide spread disillusionment with the war effort and party leadership, Huong was imprisoned for seven months without trial.

This is a piercing and unfogettable tale of the horror and spiritual weariness of war narrated by Quan, a North Vietnamese soldier of the people, who joined the army at the age of eighteen full of idealism for the Communist Party and its cause of national liberation.

'An extraordinary and profoundly tragic novel... it is Duong Thu Huong's vision and its resonant imagery that makes this book a work of art' Boston Sunday Globe

Paradise of the Blind

Duong Thu Huong

Duong Thu Huong is a veteran who spent ten years in the tunnels and air raid shelters of central Vietnam, the most heavily bomber area of her country. Huong emerged after the Vietnam war as one of the most widely read and celebrated novelists of her generation. But when her best selling novel Paradise of the Blind scandalized the party authorities in 1988 by depicting the disastrous, maoist style 1953-1956 land reform, Huong was publicly criticised and the work suddenly withdrawn from circulation. Again, like her hero, Duong Thu Huong found herself transformed overnight from patriot to pariah.Huong has not been allowed to publish any of her books in Vietnam since then.

The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family

Mai Elliott

Charting the lives of four generations of her family, the author traces her family's journey through tumultuous change, exploring different strands of Vietnamese history. It begins with her great-grandfather who rose from rural poverty to become an influential mandarin. She tells the reader of childhood hours in her grandmother's silk shop, and of hiding while French troops torched her village, watching blossoms torn by fire from the trees flutter "like hundreds of butterflies" overhead. She reveals the agonizing choices that split Vietnamese families: her eldest sister left her staunchly anti-communist home to join the Viet Minh, and spent months sleeping with her infant son in jungle camps, fearing air raids by day and tigers by night. And she follows several family members through the last, desperate hours of the fall of Saigon, including one nephew who tried to escape by grabbing the skid of a departing American helicopter.

Vietnam: The Culture

Bobbie Kalman

A title from the LANDS, PEOPLES AND CULTURES series which looks at the inhabitants of Vietnam. Introduces their families, homes, education, language and food, with colour photographs providing an insight into the lives of small highland tribes and ethnic Chinese.

Shadows and Wind

Robert Templer

Images of the Vietnam War have proved to be among the most enduring of this century - the naked girl fleeing a napalm attack, bodies lying in the ditches of My Lai. These images and the subsequent myths that have surrounded Vietnam have stifled changes in the way it is seen. For many Vietnam remains a war, not a country. SHADOWS AND WIND sets the record right and underlines the fact that life in Vietnam did not end when the helicopters left.

The theme of SHADOWS AND WIND will be the Vietnamese identity, how it has re-emerged in recent years not as a violent force but one that has sustained a country and more importantly sustained individuals. Chapters cover a broad series of topics: literature, history art and architecture, politics, religion, food, the foreign perception of Vietnam, the Vietnamese perception of foreigners, an emerging popular culture that delights in beauty contests and pompadoured magicians, the Vietnamese overseas and their role in their home country, propaganda and government control and the reaction to that, the lingering mythology of the war and the changing Vietnamese perception of the conflict.

A bright and Shining Lie

Neil Sheehan

Amazon.co.uk Review This passionate, epic account of the Vietnam War centres on Lt Col John Paul Vann, whose story illuminates America's failures and disillusionment in Southeast Asia. Vann was a field adviser to the army when American involvement was just beginning. He quickly became appalled at the corruption of the South Vietnamese regime, their incompetence in fighting the Communists and their brutal alienation of their own people. Finding his superiors too blinded by political lies to understand that the war was being thrown away, he secretly briefed reporters on what was really happening. One of those reporters was Neil Sheehan. This definitive exposition on why America lost the war won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1989.

Vietnam Inc.

Philip Jones Griffiths (Photographer), Noam Chomsky

First published in 1971, Philip Jones Griffiths' account of the Vietnamese War was the outcome of three years' reporting and is a detailed survey of the conflict. Showing us the true horrors of the war as well as offering a study of Vietnamese folk life, the author argues against the de-humanizing power of technology and highlights the arrogance and hypocrisy of American imperialistic attitudes. This new edition is a recreation of the original with Philip Jones Griffiths' personal layouts and commentaries. There is a foreword by Noam Chomsky, who was profoundly affected by the book when it was originally published.

Anatomy of War

Gabriel Kolko

This work covers the difficult story of the United States' intervention with the yet more complicated internal dynamic of the Vietnamese Revolution. It goes beyond the military, political and economic aspects of the war to explore in-depth causative factors leading to the end result.

Dispatches

Michael Herr

Amazon.co.uk Review If you've seen the movies Apocalypse Now and Platoon, in whose scripts Michael Herr had a hand, you have a pretty good idea of Herr's take on Vietnam: a hallucinatory mess, the confluence of John Wayne and LSD. Dispatches reports remarkable front-line encounters with an acid-dazed infantryman who can't wait to get back into the field and add Viet Cong kills to his long list ("I just can't hack it back in the World", he says); with a helicopter door gunner who fires indiscriminately into crowds of civilians; with daredevil photojournalist Sean Flynn, son of Errol, who disappeared somewhere inside Cambodia. Although Herr has admitted that parts of his book are fictional, this is meaty, essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Vietnam.

Tim Page's Nam

Tim Page (Photographer), William Shawcross (Introduction)

"This book is an excellent collection of Tim Pages photographs, most have been seen before in other formats and have been widely used. The photography is excellent and brings across the human face of war like very few photographers can. Can't say it enough - Excellent." Amazon reviewer

The Girl in the Picture: The Remarkable Story of Vietnam's Most Famous Casualty

Denise Chong

On 8 June 1972, nine-year-old Kim Phuc, severely burned by napalm, ran from her burning village and into the eye of history. Her photograph, seen around the world, helped turn public opinion against the Vietnam War and is one of a handful of images that remain branded in the public consciousness. This book is the story of how that photograph came to be - but also of what happened to Kim Phuc after it was taken. It opens up to readers an unknown world - the world of Vietnam after the US army left. Kim became a pawn in the Communist regime's propaganda campaign, even as her own family fought a losing battle to support itself in a physically and economically devastated country, now plagued with corruption. Kim's recovery and rehabilitation from her terrible wounds was long and arduous and, after years of manipulation by Vietnamese officials, she made a dramatic escape to Canada, where she now lives. Denise Chong has written a detailed, humanistic account of ever! yday life in the wake of the Vietnam War, as well as a meditation on the aftermath of celebrity, and the power of an image.

Heaven and Earth: When Heaven and Earth Changed Places

Le Ly Hayslip, Jay Wurts

When Heaven and Earth Changed Places" is the haunting memoir of the Vietnam war as seen through the eyes of a child who survived the horror. With the voice of a natural story-teller, Le Ly Hayslip tells the story of a young peasant girl's struggle to survive. Pressed into service by the Viet Cong, Hayslip was captured and tortured by government forces; then she was raped and almost murdered by her "comrades" in the VC. Later she lived with and loved several GIs. Finally, she married a kind-hearted American to escape the terror and insanity of the war. Once she arrived in the US in 1970, Hayslip lived the American dream to the hilt: she studied at night, worked during the day in an electronics factory and eventually became the owner of three houses and a restaurant near San Diego. Twice widowed and now unmarried, she has raised three sons. Meanwhile happiness proved elusive, the traumas of the war years lingering on in nightmare memories. In 1986 Le Ly went back to her homeland and was shocked to see the country and the people still profoundly scarred by the war. She subsequently sold the bulk of her property to start a foundation dedicated to building health clinics jointly staffed by Americans and Vietnamese.