Customer Reviews

Death in the Rice Fields

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One of the best books I ever read. If you want to to know the truth about Vietnam, this book ist a must. Peter Scholl-Latour was present in Vietnam from the French intervention to the Chinese episode. He writes very cromprehensive and with great knowlegde. Partuculary exciting is that it is a report of his personal experiences, without pretending to be a political or military scientificly valid study. That makes it more accessable to non-political expert readers. Of course, he is a worldwide acknowledged expert.
Particulary for american readers, I think this book from a non-american is important to read. Often, the american vision about the Vietnam war is somehow distorted.
So it is a very exciting and informative lecture.

Scholl-Latour shows here a profound understanding of that region. I have read other books of his in German and I find it is a pity there are no more translations of his work. The English speakers could learn a lot from his perspective: a conservative, but a very very different conservative from what you see in the US.
Scholl-Latour knows the regions he reports about for a long time, he has been there, he has lived there, he has listened and listened to all kind of groups there.

Along with Howard Simpson's book Tiger in the Barb Wire and Bernard Fall's Street Without Joy, this is one I always recommend in discussions about Vietnam before the American era. Scholl-Latour is on the scene in many French actions against the Viet Minh. This book provides far more insight to Vietnam than what I have seen written by Americans who fought in Vietnam.

Well written by a Journalist covering 34 years of conflict. The author gives intimate descriptions of the people of indochina, their religions and ideologies. There are discussions of the high-level political arm-wrestling of Vietnam, Cambodia, Loas, France, America, China and USSR. Don't expect front-line accounts of the conflicts, but mainly the author's personal experiences with high level officials, bureaucrats, common soldiers and citizens.