Dragon Ascending : Vietnam and the Vietnamese

New York: Arcade Publishing, 1996. First Edition. Hardcover. Fine/Fine. A wonderful tight clean copy, protected in a new brodart wrapper dj unclipp ed, not an ex-lib; Kamm, a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent for the New York Times who has been reporting from Southeast Asia for more than a quarter century, here e xplores Vietnam, its resilient people, its history and its likely future. T he men and women he introduces us to include General Tran Cong Man, unoffic ial spokesman for the Communist Party; Duong Thu Huong, a dissident whose d efiance of unjust authority landed her in solitary confinement; Duong Quynh Hoa, one of the founders of the National Liberation Front, whose comments reflect the disillusionment many Southerners feel toward Hanoi's postwar po licies; and Pham Xuan An, who worked as a Time correspondent during the war while secretly serving as a Viet Cong colonel. In his interviews, includin g those with survivors of the My Lai massacre, Kamm notes the astonishing a bsence of postwar hostility toward the Americans. On the other hand, there is little forgiveness toward veterans of the defeated "puppet army"; Kamm r eports that Saigon's National Cemetery, with its thousands of ARVN dead, ha s been razed. He concludes that Vietnam, standing on its own after the coll apse of the Soviet Union, is a stable country and that its heightened confi dence seems justified. Photos. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. From School Library Journal YA?The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist has produced a clearly written, accurate, personal account of Vietnam, yesterday and today. He presents a historical look at the country in order to examine and understand what is happening now. Kamm.