Vietnam. Ngo Van, In the crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese revolutionary . Edited by Ken Knabb and Hélène Fleury, translated by Hélène Fleury, Hilary Horrocks, Ken Knabb and Naomi Sager. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2010. Pp. xix + 264. Illustrations, Maps. Vinh Sinh, Phan Châu Trinh and his political writings . Edited and translated by Vinh Sinh. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 2009. Pp. xvi + 139. Illustrations.

NGO VAN, In the crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese revolutionary Edited by KEN KNABB and HELENE FLEURY, translated by HELENE FLEURY, HILARY HORROCKS, KEN KNABB and NAOMI SAGER Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2010. Pp. xix + 264. Illustrations, Maps. VINH SINH, Phan Chau Trinh and his political writings Edited and translated by v IN H S IN H Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 2009. Pp. xvi + 139. Illustrations. The realities of French colonialism inspired a wide range of responses from the Vietnamese people, sometimes manifested in words and at other times in actions. The books under review here reflect both kinds of responses from men representing successive generations of Vietnamese political activists. One helped lay the foundations for national self-strengthening while the other was an active participant in the revolutionary movement to drive out the French. These men, the reformist scholar Phan Chau Trinh (1872-1926) and the Trotskyist revolutionary Ngo Van (1912-2005), had similar objectives--a newly configured Vietnam--but rather different visions of how to achieve this goal. This difference is to some extent explained by their respective experiences of colonialism, with Ngo Van a mere 14 years old when Phan Chau Trinh died in 1926. However, it also reflects differing views of the fundamental problems faced by the Vietnamese people. These books also represent the gap between the abstractions of political rhetoric and the concrete realities of lived revolution. While Phan Chau Trinh speaks of morality, ethics and democracy, Ngo Van describes strikes, arrests, tortures and executions. Together the two works illustrate the complexities of the Vietnamese struggle, a struggle that took place both in the rarified realm of the cerebral and in the muddy realities of the quotidian. Phan Chau Trinh, as Vinh Sinh points out in his extended and extremely useful introduction, has long existed in the shadow of his contemporary Phan Boi Chau. Phan Boi Chau's relentless revolutionary activism had greater appeal to subsequent generations of Vietnamese looking back on the early anticolonial struggles. Furthermore, Phan Boi Chau placed much of the blame for Vietnam's ills on the French, while Phan Chau Trinh saw many of the problems stemming from the failures of the Vietnamese people themselves. It was this distinction that drove Phan Chau Trinh to argue for a fundamental Vietnamese self-renewal as the answer to their problems, while Phan Boi Chau's simpler message was that Vietnam's problems could be solved by the violent ouster of the French. It was, at a basic level, the distinction between reform and revolution, and it is thus that these two men's ideas have long been distinguished. Here Vinh Sinh seeks to make Phan Chau Trinh's nuanced political views more widely known to an Anglophone audience. This follows Sinh's earlier work on Phan Boi Chau, including a translation of his autobiography, Overturned chariot (in collaboration with Nicholas Wickenden; University of Hawai'i Press, 1999) and an edited volume, Phan Boi Chau and the Dong Du movement (Yale Southeast Asia Program, 1988). The present volume opens with a 55-page introduction in which Sinh introduces Phan Chau Trinh's political career and contextualises the translations that take up the remainder of the volume. He particularly emphasises the influences that Japan and Japanese scholars had on Phan Chau Trinh's thought. Sinh describes Phan Chau Trinh's 14-year exile in France, and then his return toward the end of his life. This detailed essay is an important contribution in itself, but the real value here lies in the first English translations of four important writings and public lectures given by Phan Chau Trinh. Up to this point, Phan Chatu Trinh's political views were represented in translation only by renderings of a 1907 letter he wrote to Governor General Paul Beau, urging Franco-Vietnamese co-operation, albeit with greater French sensitivity to Vietnamese aspirations and competencies. …