Content area
Full Text
RADICALISM AND THE ORIGINS OF THE VIETNAMESE REVOLUTION. By Hue-Tam Ho Tai. Cambridge (Massachusetts): Harvard University Press. 1992. x, 325 pp. US$34.95, cloth. ISBN 0-674-74612-0.
THIS BOOK is a stride into the investigation of the Vietnamese national movement as well as the analytical inventory of the ideological debates into which the newly born intelligentsia was involved. The historians of Vietnam began to be concerned by the wars of Vietnam, then they proceeded upstream as in D. Marr's Anticolonialism, D. Hemery's La Lutte, and Huynh Kim Khanh's' Communism. But, curiously, considering the period between the beginning of the twentieth century and the 1930s, there was a gap except for a focus on Vietnamese Communism. It was necessary to complete the puzzle so as to deeply understand the dynamics of the Vietnamese movement of liberation.
Mrs. Hue-Tam Ho Tai chose to examine a buoyant period which was the laboratory of the thirties and forties. The impact of the French colonial domination did not only bring out economic changes but also, through education, as limited as it...