Book Reviews--Southeast Asia: Vietnam at War; Vietnam's Southern Revolution: From Peasant Insurrection to Total War; A Vietnam War Reader: A Documentary History from American and Vietnamese Perspectives

Vietnam at War . By Mark Philip Bradley . Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2009. xiii, 233 pp. ISBN: 9780199657988 (paper; also available as e-book).

Vietnam's Southern Revolution: From Peasant Insurrection to Total War . By David Hunt . Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press , 2008. x, 272 pp. ISBN: 9781558496927 (paper).

A Vietnam War Reader: A Documentary History from American and Vietnamese Perspectives . By Michael H. Hunt . Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press , 2010. 256 pp. ISBN: 9780807859919 (paper).

Book Reviews--Southeast Asia

More than fifteen years ago, Matthew Connelly encouraged us to remove "the Cold War lens" from our perception of the various wars of decolonization occurring throughout the developing world in the latter half of the twentieth century.¹⁴Michael Hunt, Mark Bradley, and David Hunt have all, to varying degrees, done that in their three treatments of the Vietnamese struggle for independence and unification. Michael Hunt's contribution, A Vietnam War Reader: A Documentary History from American and Vietnamese Perspectives, decenters the Cold War by providing a documentary collection that attempts to dispel the predominant American "myth" about the Vietnam War, which holds that it was primarily "about" the experience of America and its soldiers (Michael Hunt [MH], p. xvii). Instead, by juxtaposing the Vietnamese with the American perspective, he demonstrates that Vietnam's wars were about far more than the geopolitical concerns that prompted the American intervention in the first place. For the Vietnamese, Michael Hunt's collection suggests, the near century and a half of time the documents selected cover (1861 to 1997) were marked by resistance to foreign intervention and an effort to establish a politically viable and unified, independent nation.

This reader would be particularly useful to undergraduate students looking for an introduction to the conflict. Michael Hunt offers a relatively equal focus on the Vietnamese and American perspective of Vietnam's long history of conflict that takes into account the views of American and Vietnamese policymakers and soldiers as well as Vietnamese nationalists from the colonial period and American opponents of the war. It is arranged chronologically over the first four chapters, while the fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters break with the chronology to deal, respectively, with the war on the ground in...