This is that rare book on Vietnam which contributes new information which is essential to understanding the war and the country. Chanoff and Toai have assembled an extraordinary set of new interviews, published reminiscences, and war-time interrogation reports with northern and southern Vietnamese participants in the decades long struggle to build a unified communist country.

These are as frank and revealing a set of eyewitness interviews as anyone is ever likely to assemble. They deal honestly and painfully with the hardships of war, the combination of idealism and brutality that pervade daily life during war, and the shattered dreams of many participants during land reform, ideological purges and power grabs.

I consider this one of the 15 or 20 books that belongs on everyone's list of the ten most important books written on the war. Along with books by David Marr, Hue-Tam Ho Tai and Le Ly Hayslip, I consider it one of the essential sources on Vietnam itself. There is not just the insight of personal memoirs from well-known events, there are also many major revelations about critical events in the war -- such as the Buddhist struggles and the building of the Ho Chi Minh trail.

I have been teaching courses on the contry and the war for over 20 years at the University of California at San Diego. I expect to be using this book in class for many years.

If you would like to undertake the daunting task of studying the history of the little-understood country of Vietnam, this is the place to begin. Professor Woods book is brief, but not deficient. It is readable, concise, and entertaining--characteristics not often found in history texts. Furthermore, the illustrations and maps make the narrative come alive. While the book is too short to answer all of the student's questions, it will give general guidelines to launch a more comprehensive study of Vietnam and its related countries in Asia. Woods is a terrific scholar with the unique ability to cut through the scholarly jargon and verbosity to give the reader a clear overall picture of what Vietnam's history is all about.

"Vietnam, the heartland remembers" is absolutly riviting. It is one of the most accurate accounts of the war that I have read. I highly reccomend it to anyone of the so called "gen X" crowd, (I am personally part of that crowd). It may offer some reason to why we are the way we are. Remember,"those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it". To anyone who served in that war it will be a touching and personnal experience. As a verteran of the Persian Gulf War it made me proud and humbled at the same time. Let us not forget our fallen warriors or the those who survived to teach us.

Although I am in the process of preparing a more formal review for publication elsewhere, I would like to note here that Nicholas Nugent's book _Vietnam: The Second Revolution_ is a fine work. I learned a great deal reading it and would recommend it highly!

Steven A. Leibo Ph.D. The Sage Colleges and Suny-Albany Co-Founder of H-ASIA

Those who intend to read only one book about Vietnam should read this one. The author covers this disaster with a unique insight into the flawed decision-making processes of otherwise intelligent bureaucrats who failed to understand the complexity of the situation. War games prior to our massive air campaign had predicted the eventual tragic outcome, yet the results were completely ignored. A combat commander (which I was) usually sees a war from an entirely different perspective than that of government-employed theorists. The theorists may dismiss their mistakes as an investment in the learning process about a problem. The commander is left to count his dead, and write the letters to their families.

In 1943, two years before his birth in Vietnam's Mekong Delta, Toai's father and older brother joined the Vietminh, the communist underground movement in Vietnam. Toai became a National Liberation Front (NLF, Viet Cong) supporter as a high school student and rose to be an important student leader in the Saigon University during the late 1960's. He published a student magazine Tu Quet, (Self Determinination) and unswervingly followed the Viet Cong's highly-attractive propaganda line, "Peace, Freedom, Independence, Neutrality, and Social Welfare."

Toai never formally joined the Viet Cong, but, for nationalistic and idealistic reasons, he served it superbly. He led takeovers of the Vietnamese National Assembly and the Cambodian Embassy in Saigon, and lectured at Berkley to American anti-war activists (who thought his views too tame). After the North Vietnamese Army imposed peace in 1975, he became a senior official of the Ministry of Finance under the Provisional Government. He soon disagreed on purely professional grounds with a superior official and was quickly and unceremoniously tossed into jail.

Toai had previously read Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago and dismissed its substance as propaganda. When arrested, he vividly recalled Gulag's chapter 2, entitled "Arrest," in which the freshly arrested victim invariably thinks, "Who me? What for? It's a mistake, they'll clear it up." Toai consoled himself that the Gulag was in "old" Russia, and that he was in the "new" Vietnam. It turned out that there was no significant difference. He lived through two and a half years of horrors that may seem unbelievable to those who have not read Solzhenitsyn's works.

Toai was never charged with any offense, and was thus jailed for no reason at all. His wife, a French citizen, managed to return to France and from there won his freedom. As he was being released, the fact that there was no official reason whatever for either his arrest or his release caused bureaucratic gyrations that would have been hilarious had the issue been less serious.

During much of his time in prison, Toai was befriended by Nguyen Van Hien, an old and often-jailed Vietminh cadre from before the time that Ho Chi Minh left the Soviet Comintern and returned to Vietnam. Hien asked Toai to recall the NLF's program, a shining beacon - promulgate all democratic freedoms, amnesty to all political detainees, abolish all concentration camps, and strictly ban all illegal arrests and imprisonments. "What do you make of all that now," asked Hien, and his expression suggested, "We've all been taken in...Look around you stupid, what do you see?"

Incredibly, despite his sufferings and disillusionment, Hien remained a loyal communist. Like uncountable thousands of other idealists before him, he still grasped his lifelong ideal although he probably understood that he had been purged purely because he knew too much. "I've never eaten chocolate," he said. "I'll probably never know what it tastes like."

Toai eventually spoke again to former anti-Vietnam war activists in the U.S., thinking that he had something important to tell them. He was wrong. Most of them didn't want to listen.

(Published in a local newsletter in 1987.)

This book, illustrated with line drawings, introduces a few hundred words useful for daily life among Vietnamese people.

It has the flavor of a children's book, with big pictures, a few words on a page. It has the flair of a successful children's book, in that everything makes sense, both in ways you can point to - all the words on clothes comes together, all the words on the food, etc. - and in ways I can't put my finger on. The book feels good to use. There's a nice spirit to it, perhaps an outcome of a successful collaboration between the author in California and the artist in Ha Noi.

I have ten years' mixed experience with the language, academic and domestic, and am using the book to prepare to use the language of daily life again. I think that others will find it suits their purposes as well.

I have entered into no contract to transfer the intellectual property rights to this review.

This is an excellent approach to learning a language: listen to the word, phrase, or sentence in English; hear it pronounced twice in Vietnamese, and then repeat it. Listen to the tape while following the booklet. The booklet follows the tape exactly with the English phrase, phonetic spelling, and Vietnamese spelling with diacritical and accent marks. Learning to hear and pronounce the six tones is difficult at first, but the male and female speakers make the distinctions quite clearly. On the downside: The booklet does not have an English to Vietnamese or a Vietnamese to English dictionary. There are a few inconsistencies in pronouncing the same words in different places.

After almost a century of modern-style research, the world is not exactly short of ethnographies. You can find works on everybody from Indiana town dwellers to Sri Lankan fishermen. Papua New Guinea, as an area where a wide variety of cultures, some with Stone Age technologies, endured well into the 20th century, attracted the attention of anthropologists right from the start. There are a very large number of books on the country, starting with Malinowski's seminal works on the Trobriand Islands during and after WW I. Most, but not all, of them concentrated on investigations of what are often referred to as 'traditional cultures', if not 'primitive'. Anthropologists, not unlike Western tourists, have often been lured by the 'exotic' parts of the world where cultures extremely different from their own could be found. Bateson, Burridge, Glasse, Heider, Hogbin, Mead, Pospisil, Rappaport, Reay, Schieffelin, and Wagner to name a few, gravitated to Papua New Guinea, drawn perhaps by the chance to study people whose cultures were 'untouched' by the West. 'Untouched' is no doubt a relative word. A few others, especially Lawrence and Worsley, delved into the cargo cults, an aspect of Melanesian religion that sprang up in the wake of colonial pressures on traditional beliefs. Modern Papua New Guinea, with its Christianity, bureaucracy, development projects, education, corruption, urban crime, and population explosion, has not received so much attention. Until now. Michael French Smith's VILLAGE ON THE EDGE is a delightful new ethnography based on work in the same village in the mid-1970s and then in the late '90s. Based on the idea of observing change, because Kragur village, on Kairiru island, off the north coast of the country, has been changing rapidly for many decades, Smith succeeds brilliantly. To my taste, he strikes just the right note between popular writing and professional investigation. In a clear, jargon-less style, he covers many areas usually found in ethnographies, such as village structure, family structure, the economic and political system, and religious beliefs, but focusses on how all these things have changed. It is a down-to-earth, non-exotic picture of present dilemmas for the Kragur villagers who still, after over twenty years of independence, remain poised between a sharing, cooperative society based on personal ties and the money-based, more individualistic one introduced as a correct model by the West and emulated by educated, town-dwelling locals. Smith puts himself into the picture, admits to his predilections and difficulties. Refreshingly, he does not hide behind some false 'objectivity', but shows how he accepted certain privileges (and dealt with some problems) that came with being a 'whiteman'. This honesty, coupled with a sense of humor and nice introduction of the flavor of Pidgin English or Tok Pisin, a national language in the country, made the book all the more appealing.

Melanesian societies often believed that knowledge'-of magic or ritual'-held the key to success in any endeavor, would be the best guarantee of prosperity. Those who had the best knowledge grew the best crops, caught the most fish, or had the most successful trading relationships. But, if many people in the village had that knowledge, then the whole village would be prosperous and successful. Thus, Kragur villagers, like most Melanesians, saw Western education as the way to go if they wanted to raise their standard of living, to obtain money and an easier life. Get Western education, prosper like the Westerners. In a way, Smith points out in the heart of the book, they have been proven right, but the results challenge the whole belief system that underlay their society. For them, if individuals prosper, but the village does not, the new knowledge has failed to produce the desired result. But as time goes by, as more individuals prosper, will not the old ideals completely fade, will not the old cooperative society vanish ? The village is on the edge.

I urge everyone interested in knowing what Papua New Guinea is like today to read this book. It should be on every reading list dealing with the modern Pacific, modern Melanesia, or 'dilemmas of development'. If you are trying to attract students to the field of anthropology or to draw their attention to the process of writing ethnographies, you can hardly go wrong with VILLAGE ON THE EDGE.

This is a book that featured the Battle of Easter Sunday on March 26, 1967. I performed a rescue that day, and was included in the book's characters when Harvey Meyerson wrote this book a few years after the event. An excerpt had preceded publication and was seen in LOOK Magazine late in 1968. Many of us in the Outlaws and other units of the Delta Aviation Battalion are proud to still have both copies. We are still reuniting after all these years, and often refer to this particular book as a cherished keepsake. My book, OUTLAWS IN VIETNAM, covers the same period, but Harvey Meyerson's overview of Delta Vietnamese behavior and politics cannot be matched. Add it to your personal RVN collection.