Customer Reviews

Dragon Ascending: Vietnam and the Vietnamese

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This New York Times reporter has won a Pulitzer Prize award for his reports on the boat people in the late seventies. The present book is a good review of postwar Vietnam from the reeducation camps, the differences between Saigon and Hanoi, the arrogance of the communists to the hope for a better future under the "doi moi" policy.

His interviews with Can Giao, a nationalist who has been imprisoned 21 times by all the different regimes, Duong Thu Huong (Paradise of the Blind), and Bao Ninh (The sorrow of war) are enlightening. All these people who are either former communists or sympathizers are presently not very happy with the communist regime. The author also believes that the 1975 diaspora represents the "severest judgment the Vietnamese had expressed about the communist regime".

I thought this book was very helpful in understanding the history of Vietnam and the present up to 1998. It contained information that I had not read in much detail before. I was particularly interested in the legends about the beginning of the Vietnamese people and it's history prior to the Vietnam War. Even the account of the Vietnam War was different from other histories I have read and this book recounted the post Vietnam War era in an interesting way. If you are interested in Vietnam, this is a book to read.