Shadows and Wind: A View of Modern Vietnam
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List Price: $16.00 $12.00 $ 4.00 ( 25% ) Penguin (Non-Classics) Robert Templer
Binding: PaperbackDewey Decimal Number: 959.704EAN: 9780140285970ISBN: 0140285970Label: Penguin (Non-Classics)Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)Number Of Items: 1Number Of Pages: 400Publication Date: 1999-09-01Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)Studio: Penguin (Non-Classics)
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Editorial Reviews: Shadows and Wind , Robert Templer paints a fascinating and fresh picture of a country usually viewed with hazy nostalgia or deep suspicion. Here is Hanoi, an increasingly tense and troubled city approaching its millennium but uncertain of its direction. Here are people emerging from a long wilderness of malnutrition, discovering a new lifestyle of leisure and luxury. And everywhere are the anomalies that burst the bubble of optimism: a vastly expensive luxury hotel sitting empty in an unknown town six hours from an international airport; museums crammed with fake exhibits. And there remains the one-party Communist state, still wrapped in secrecy and corruption, and making for an uneasy bedfellow with the rapacious capitalism it now encourages.Shadows and Wind is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the Vietnam that now has emerged from a century of conflict with both foreign powers and with itself.The Financial Times The Guardian
Spotlight customer reviews: Customer Rating: Summary: Engaging and FascinatingComment: There are so very many books about Vietnam, I was hesitant when I picked this up, and I expected to be disappointed. On the contrary - I was immediately engaged and found myself eager to get some time alone so I could keep reading.
Customer Rating: Summary: Contemporary Look At VietnamComment: While in Vietnam I picked up an interesting book about contemporary Vietnam called Shadows and Wind by Robert Templer. Anyway, after my first trip to Vietnam I read Stanley Karnow's excellent history, Vietnam, which focuses on the cuses of the war and the aftermath and I felt this might be a follow up of sorts, picking up where Karnow left off. It's not as contemporary as I'd like-it was published in 1998, but the author has interesting insights to make about the myth of Vietnam, the culture, the generation gap, food, politics, Viet Kieu (exiled or refugee Vietnamese), religion, and everyday life. Albeit the chapters on politics were long and difficult to get through-they came in the middle of the book, which seemed to slow me in my progress. However, I found the opening and closing chapters the most interesting and informative about contemporary Vietnamese society and from what I saw on my last trip to Hanoi-it is still fairly accurate. The Vietnamese are slowing making their way to the usual global consumerism with their pursuit of Honda Dream motorcycles, cell phones, and other consumer goods, but the governement has kept economic expansion moving at a trickle compared to other countries. More than half of the population was born after the war and no one ever gave me grief because I was an American. It'll be interesting to see whether or not Vietnam develops an economic model like China.
Customer Rating: Summary: One of Two Great books on Vietnam!Comment: I read this book because it was recommended in the back of my favorite book on Vietnam: The Bamboo Chest: An Adventure in Healing the Trauma of War
Customer Rating: Summary: Get the facts behind the headlines!Comment: This book and memoir "The Bamboo Chest: An Adventure in Healing the Trauma of War" by Frederick "Cork Graham are the best books on Vietnam that my reading club and I have read in the last ten years. Both of them stories that have never been told by any other writers who appear only to be regurgitating the findings of previous writers many of them long since dead. If you really want to know what is behind the veil of secrecy in Vietnam then these "Shadows and Wind" and "The Bamboo Chest" are the books for you! Both are written by authors who spent more than a year in Vietnam. Graham spent eleven months as the first american political prisoner held in that country since the end of outright fighting.Customer Rating: Summary: Wonderful bookComment: 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.
