Customer Reviews

Pagodas, Gods and Spirits of Vietnam

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This is a coffee-table style book: hundreds of beautiful, color pictures, with a short, informative essay. In fact, the nearly 50-page essay is better than many coffee-table books are. If you're interested in pictures, this is your book. If you're interested in descriptions of beliefs and practices, this is merely an introduction. Unfortunately, I don't know of a good book for that purpopse, although I've looked around both in Vietnam and the United States. Also, this book doesn't cover Hoa Hao, Vietnamese Catholicism or the Montangards' religions at all, and only the most famous Cham and Cao Dai sites.

This is a great book one never gets tired of looking through. It is full of a great variety of beautiful color photographs, all of them giving you a different glimpse of religion in Vietnam. Some shots show you the outside of the sacred temples and pagodas in all of their ornate architecture, others the insides of these buildings as people--priests and lay folks--pray and carry out rites. And many others still focus on the icons, the deities being worshipped. One excellent thing about these latter shots is that the deities are always situated in their ritual contexts (incense burning, offerings spread out before them) and not in the abstract like museum pieces. By the end, one is left with a vivid sense of the deeply intense and heart-felt religiosity of the Vietnamese people as they really live it.

The essay at the beginning is quite helpful, preparing you to generally have an idea what you're looking at (so that the images are not just exotic sound and fury signifying nothing) and doing a fine job of showing how several different religious traditions have flowed together to inform and shape Vietnamese religiosity. The treatment is careful and well-researched while written in a very accessible style.

I'm not sure who wouldn't like this lovely book. Anyone interested in Vietnam and its culture should, for sure. Photography buffs will also find something here, I'd think. But I think scholars of Religious Studies should also take note--sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, and a book like this is invaluable in approaching lived religion. Finally, this is a super book for any armchair travelers out there; it's the next best thing to actually going to Vietnam in person.

I highly recommend this beautifully photographed and well document book on the art and culture of Vietnam. I loved the pictures of many sacred ceremonies and Ms. Unger's descriptive text. It is a miracle that these buildings still exist after what Vietnam has endured. The only reservation I have with the book is that it does not cover ancient Vietnam history in depth. Otherwise, the book is extraordinary.