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Spotlight customer reviews:
Customer Rating:

Summary: Wonderful book
Comment: A truly wonderful book. Templer writes with beautiful flowing prose, expressing complex ideas and
thoughts in an enjoyable and easy to understand manner. Thoroughly researched, this well-organized
book provides some essential history and how the history relates to the modern society, then covers
all of the main issues of Vietnamese culture and society - including hunger, writing, AIDS, youth,
and corrruption - bringing a picture to life of an often confusing and stereotyped land. I learned
a tremendous amount from this book. Many of my pre-impressions and stereotypes were wiped away and
I finished with more questions, more curiousity, and more understanding about this country that I
expected. Highly recommended.

Customer Rating:

Summary: A windbag errant
Comment: Persuasive only to the unknowledgeable reader this is journalism at its slippery worst. Close
examination of the references shows many inaccuracies which make even a junior scholar of Vietnam
cringe.It is clear that Mr Templer has no real knowledge of the Vietnamese language and his social
and political commentrary is very much a scissors and paste selection from various news agencies.
Even more disappointing is his obvious bias which seems to have been the result of perceived attacks
on his personal vanity. He is far from a dispassionate observer and this book will only reinforce
the prejudices of readers who are parti pris. One is saddened to think that the naive should be so
easily drawn to such self-opinionated stuff, when there are books like Neil Jamieson's
"Understanding Vietnam" available.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Too Western, too detailed, and too boring
Comment: While this book does exactly what it says, gives "a view of modern Vietnam", and does so with an
impressive swath of parts of society, I wasn't satisfied with the "view" that it presents. First,
there are marked Western overtones; in one chapter, young people's valuing reform above democracy is
presented with some cynicism, as young people's valuing material gain over freedom. It could just as
easily be argued that these young people believe that their country is not ready for Western-style
democracy. Another example is the incredible detail into which the author delves, on phenomena that
are different from the Western experience but are applicable to many Third World countries. The
names in the anecdotes are Vietnamese, but Templer doesn't do a good job of saying what about the
phenomena themselves are particularly Vietnamese. If this book were my only experience with Vietnam
and someone asked me, "What makes Vietnam different from other Third World countries?" I would be
virtually stumped. Still another example is his beyond-superficial treatment of Buddhism and its
influence on Vietnamese people, history, and culture. He has an entire chapter on religion in
Vietnam, and virtually all of its focus is on Vietnamese Catholics and their history. Vietnamese
Catholics make up about eight percent of the Vietnamese population, and Buddhists are some sixty
percent. Instead of exploring the particularities of Buddhism, Vietnamese-style, Templer basically
dismisses it as a ... mishmash of beliefs. There is a palpable anti-Communist tone in certain
portions of the book, which is annoying because in countries like Vietnam the system would be
corrupt whether you called the ruling class "the Communist Party", "the Socialist Party", or even
the "Coalition of Freely Elected Non-Party Affiliated Officials". Templer seems to direct wrath at
Communism that is more logically directed at a corrupt system and entrenched power in general.

Second, some of the chapters are just not that interesting. One chapter seems to be "the
architecture chapter". That's just not the kind of thing that someone who buys a text-only book on
Vietnam is interested in, in general.
Third, the detail Templer goes into is admirable, and
shows how well-researched the book is, but it isn't that interesting. After a while, the anecdotes
in a particular chapter all seem to run together. I got the sense that this book could have been cut
down to a friendlier length if each chapter had contained only one major anecdote.
Overall, it's
a decent book, especially if your library already contains some books about the country, but if
you're only going to read one book on Vietnam, this DEFINITELY shouldn't be it.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Insightful
Comment: I have read and reread this book many times and still find it one of the most interesting and
balanced books on postwar Vietnam. The author, born in England, spent three years in Vietnam as a
correspondent for France press.

He characterized general Giap as "ferociously driven, vain,
indifferent to battle losses and to the suffering of his people". He talked about "the poisoned and
scorch earth left by American bombings", the sepulchral world of the Communist Party of Vietnam with
"its wild menagerie of fiefdioms, provincial power bases..." and about greed, graft, and nepotism in
Hanoi. He also mentioned about "the melancholy tribe" of the overseas Vietnamese and noticed Hanoi
was "never magnanimous in victory and tried to erase the very existence of South Vietnam."

When
the communist Party claimed to represent the people he talked about "an absurd act of ventriloquism"
and noted that communist Vietnam was slowly drifting into senescence.

Highly recommended.

Customer Rating:

Summary: This book shows the real Vietnam
Comment: I think anyone who has spent any time in Vietnam will recognise so much in this book. I went back to
what I used to think of as my homeland but now I no longer feel at home there and this book made me
understand why. This beautiful cultured country is laboring under a system that still tries to crush
people rather than help them. This book sometimes paints a gloomy picture of what the communist
party has done but it also captures the spirit of the Vietnamese in the chapters on food, arts and
religion.

Those reviewers who have attacked this book seem to be people who have never been to
Vietnam and are no position to know whether the book is accurate or not. Their aggressive attacks
are motivated more by ignorance and spite than any knowledge of the country. One strangely complains
that Mr. Templer says he knows everything because he is lived in the country three years but this is
from a person who has clearly never been there and knows nothing about the country. This books is
detailed and a little dense but no other book available today comes close to giving a sense of life
in Vietnam and an understanding of the culture and people and government. Read this if you really
want to know about the country.

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