Shadows and Wind: A View of Modern Vietnam
"I am too young to have seen the Vietnam War on television or to have read about it at the time," British journalist Templer announces at the beginning of this penetrating and lyrical history, confessing that his own impressions of Vietnam had been formed by American books and movies. But upon arriving there in 1994 for a three-year stint as a reporter for Agence France-Presse, Templer found that more than half of the population had been born after American troops pulled out of Saigon, and that the reality of life in modern Vietnam was much more complex than he had realized. The lingering images of French colonial Indochine and the American experience in 'Nam oversimplify and obscure the struggles of a communist nation in the midst of economic reformADoi Moi, or "renovation"A after half a century of armed conflict. Not to mention the "Rip Van Winkle popular culture" that has awakened with an enormous appetite, but uneasy stomach, for Western stimulus. Dismissing as "drive-by reporting" such celebrated books on his topic as Frances FitzGerald's Fire in the Lake and William Prochnau's Once Upon a Distant War, Templer has built his own vision of Vietnam through hundreds of interviews and careful analysis of Vietnamese journalism and literature. A picture of a diverse culture emerges in a nation struggling to understand its relationship with China, adjust to feast rather than famine and balance its communist past with an increasingly capitalist present. (Sept.)Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.