Vietnam

SEE ALSO: Vietnam Publications, published by Yale University Council on Southeast Asia Studies

#61   Allegories of the Vietnamese Past:Unification and the Production of a Modern Historical Identity
by Wynn Wilcox. iv, 211pp. (2011). Cloth, $37.00; paper, $26.00. 
   In order to legitimate a particular ideal, such as the concept of a nation, various historians have embellished or even fabricated certain episodes in history to bolster a preferred vision of Vietnamese nationalism and to provide an ideological justification for their favored regime. This study proposes that the interpretation of historical allegories can elucidate the ideologies of unification and identity more effectively than resorting to a simple empirical approach to the past.
     Reviewers’ Comments: “…Wynn Wilcox draws upon a deep knowledge of historiography in Vietnamese, French, and English in order to mount a considerable reshaping of the important questions of Vietnamese History and appeal to a broad audience of readership interested in politics, history, the Vietnam War, literature and the nature of truth.” -William B. Noseworthy, The Newsletter, IIAS
>Click here or on book cover for additional information

#57    Hoa Lò: Hanoi Hilton Stories
By Nguyên Chí Thiên.
296 pp. (2007). Cloth $37.00; paper $25.00
     Nguyên Chí Thiên crafts seven stories in prose from his experience at the Hanoi central prison - the infamous Hanoi Hilton - where he spent six of a total of twenty-seven years as a political prisoner in Communist Vietnam.
    Reviewers’ Comments: “Totalitarianism creates hell on earth. In Nguyen Chi Thien, that hell has found its Dante…a tribute to the power of the human spirit over tyranny and of art over oblivion.” - Michael Lind, The New American Foundation
   Editorial Comments: “The austerity, menace and extremity of long imprisonment under conditions that are calculated to defeat the spirit and body have the capacity to produce great literature…a magical blend of…close observation of constrained surroundings and…interior life together with the lyricism that hopeless situations can, pardoxically, produce” -James C. Scott, Yale University
>click here, or on cover image for photos and information about the author

#23     Peasant Politics and Religious Sectarianism: Peasant and Priest in the Cao Dai in Viet Nam, by Jayne S. Werner. iv, 123 pp. (1981).  $12.00 
   Founded as a small elite cult in Saigon in 1925, the Cao Dai became Vietnam’s first mass nationalist organization and by 1930 had 500,000 members in a regional population of four million. The author combines a sociological analysis of the fundamental social conditions of the genesis and development of the movement and of its cultural dimensions.
   Reviewers’ Comments: “Despite the books’ brevity, it is a remarkably complete narrative and analytic history….(a) thought provoking study” -Alfred McCoy, ASAA
     ”…one of the best studies about (the) social phenomenon (of such) religious movements…and…due to its theory and methodology it will remain a classic…” -Journal of Contemporary Asia