Need to understand Vietnam?
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I bought this book as I needed to try to understand Vietnam as quickly as possible, and it didn’t disappoint. In a very easy writing style, structured around meetings with Vietnamese people from a wide variety of backgrounds and lifestyles, Lamb’s book reads a bit like a travelogue that isn’t. He examines life in Vietnam today (well, a few years ago now, and things have already changed), and looks back to the years before and during the ‘American War’, as the Vietnamese rightly call it. Having been a teenager at the time of the war and being totally confused by it, I am grateful to Lamb for explaining the war from both sides. He is clearly in love with a country and people and this pervades every page. My only criticism is that in referring to a subject about which I am more familiar, the impact of the war on Laos, he gets his facts wrong. (He says that Laos is the most bombed country in history, but it is the most bombed country in history PER CAPITA, which is quite different). I just hope this example of slack journalism is not representative of the facts he has presented in the rest of the book. I am inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt and recommend this book to anyone wanting to get a warmly painted picture of life in Vietnam today.
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