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Vietnam: State, War and Revolution (1945-1946) . By David G. Marr . Berkeley : University of California Press , 2013. xxvii, 721 pp. $55.00 (cloth).
Book Reviews--Southeast Asia
David Marr's Vietnam: State, War and Revolution (1945-1946) is a tour de force by someone who has already contributed far more than his share to scholarship on Vietnam. Following his studies of Vietnamese anti-colonialism, early twentieth-century intellectual history, and the 1945 independence struggle, this book takes us from the August Revolution to the brink of the Franco-Viá»[double dagger]t Minh War in December 1946. While Marr's earlier volumes followed an optimistic trajectory of Vietnamese progress towards independence, this one is notable for its sober assessment of the almost insurmountable difficulties in creating a new state, one that could satisfy popular dreams of a better life. He also shows with unprecedented documentary clarity that the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) was not in total control of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and demonstrates glaring policy differences between the party leadership and Há»" Chí Minh's government.
Marr deploys a complex array of sources, covering each of his themes with so much depth and granularity that the reader needs to slow down and reread portions of the book in order to absorb all the information. Each of his nine chapters covers the same time period, roughly from March 1945 to the close of 1946, but explores a special theme. Thus we view these months from a variety of angles, with the focus moving from government construction to defense; negotiations with the French; the search for foreign support; the treatment of domestic opponents; and, perhaps most importantly, the relationships among the ICP, the Viet Minh front, and the government. A...