A History of Laos

Martin Stuart Fox

'The author is an Australian who covered the second Indochina War as a foreign correspondent. Insight into what really went on from an inside point of view.' Jan Lander

A Dragon Apparent: Travels in Cambodia

Norman Lewis

"This was a very interesting read... back to the times before commercialism took over these areas. Extremely readable and made me want to find out more" Jan Lander

Derailed in Uncle Ho's Victory Garden - Tim Page cover

Tim Page

Follows Page's odyssey - 20 years after the liberation of Vietnam - through the land that dominated his life as a war photographer. His job used to be to record the horror, now he can tell of the country's supreme beauty, and mourn the agony of the killing fields.

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.

Voices from S-21

David Chandler

This text examines the Khmer Rouge phenomenon by focusing on one of its key institutions, the secret prison outside Phnom Penh known by the code name "S-21". More than a chronicle of the Khmer Rouge barbarism it is an examination of the psychological dimension of state-sponsored terrorism.

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.

Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia. Reprinted October 2002.

William Shawcross

Good to see it is available once again. My dog-eared copy was bought from a street vendor in Ho Chi Minh City and lost in Hanoi before I was able to finish it. So I'm particularly glad to be able to get hold of a new copy. Brilliant book.(David).

Brother Number One: A Political Biography

David P. Chandler

In the tragic recent history of Cambodia - a past scarred by a long occupation by Vietnamese forces and by the preceding three-year reign of terror by the brutal Khmer Rouge - no figure looms larger or more ominously than that of Pol Pot. As secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) from 1962 and as Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea (DK), he was widely blamed for trying to destroy Cambodian society by implementing policies whose effects were genocidal. Based on interviews and on a wide range of sources in English, Cambodian, and French, this study seeks to cast light on the ideas and behaviour of this enigmatic man and his entourage against the background of post-World War II events, and to provide an understanding of this horrific, pivotal period of Cambodian history.

Angkor

Claude Jacques, Michael Freeman (Photographer)

This pictorial record celebrates the cities and temples of Angkor in Southeast Asia. Ever since explorer and naturalist Henri Mouhot rediscovered the centre of Khmer civilization in Cambodia over a hundred years ago, the buildings, which date from the 9th to the 13th century, have become a source of great interest. Each of the significant monuments is illustrated, including the Angkor Wat itself, and the overgrown 13th-century temples of Ta Prohm and Preah Kahn.

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

Cambodia : Report from a Stricken Land

Henry Kamm

"Kamm vividly communicates the pain and the pathos of the Cambodian people as they have been used and misused both as pawns in larger geopolitical struggles by Thailand, Viet Nam, China, the former Soviet Union, and, sadly, the United States as well as their internal political leaders- including the current batch of squabbling, feuding leaders obsessed with power and the perquisites of power while the pressing needs of the masses of the Cambodian people go abegging." 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.

The Gate

Francois Bizot

French ethnologist Francois Bizot's The Gate is a unique insight into the rise of the Khmer Rouge. In 1971 Bizot was studying ancient khmer traditions and living with his khmer partner and daughter in a small village in the environs of the Angkor temple complex. The Khmer Rouge was fighting a guerilla war in rural Cambodia and during a routine visit to a nearby temple, Bizot and his two khmer colleagues were captured and imprisoned deep in the jungle by the Khmer Rouge on suspicion of working for the CIA. On trial for his life, over the next three months Bizot developed a strong relationship with his captor, Comrade Douch, who would later become the Khmer Rouge's chief interrogator and commandant of the horrifying Tuol Sleng prison where thousands were tortured prior to execution. The portrait Bizot gives of the young schoolteacher-turned revolutionary and their interaction is simultaneously fascinating and terrifying.

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.

When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge.

Chanrithy Him

This is one of the first childhood memoirs to emerge from the hell of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Capturing the overwhelming immediacy of the baffling events, Chanrithy Him writes through the eyes of her younger self in the present tense. She vividly recounts her trek through the hell of the "killing fields" and gives a child's-eye view of a world where rudimentary labour camps are the norm and modern technology no longer exists. Death and illness become companions in the camps; yet throughout, her family remain loyal to one another.