Vietnam's Southern Revolution: From Peasant Insurrection to Total War, 1959-1968 (Culture, Politics, and the Cold War)
This is a marvelous work of globally inflected social history that marks a sharp and welcome departure from much of the existing literature on the war. Hunt's book takes us for the first time deep into the interior worlds of war and revolution. It is also beautifully written, demonstrating a keen eye for the illuminating example and the succinct quotation. I expect it will find a wide and appreciative audience among general readers but also among scholars and students of the Vietnam War, modern Vietnamese history, peasant politics, the Cold War, and war and society more generally.(Mark Philip Bradley, author of Imagining Vietnam: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919--1950)In this outstanding resource for undergraduates and other seeking the perspective of Vietnamese villagers in the 1960s, Hunt provides countless direct citations from RAND Corporation interviews with Vietnamese who fought the US in the Mekong Delta. The author showcases the remarkable richness of the interviews and organizes the material thematically to help readers understand the texture of village life during the war: the tension between traditions and new opportunities, the war's impact on women, and the shift from relative optimism to unmitigated dread as the war escalated in 1965.... Highly recommended.(Choice)David Hunt has written a superb book... the best book on Vietnam's Southern Revolution.(Journal of Contemporary Asia)