The question of U.S. victory in Vietnam has been asked since the fall of Saigon in 1975. Yet the central aspect is not really one of military victory but what goals were attempted and were any actually achieved. Former army lieutenant colonel and West Point graduate F. Charles Parker IV discusses the strategies for winning the Vietnam war and how closely toward the U.S. Marine Corps landing at Danang did the upper levels in U.S. defense department choose to fight to a stalemate. Perhaps the most fascination revelation is how the war was to be prosecuted (in terms of the "crossover point") and at what point the war could be considered to be won (March, 1968).

This book lays out all the flaws in the conventional wisdom on the war on both the right and the left. Examining Vietnam not as a conflict in a vacuum, it shows all the complex maneuvering between the U.S., China, and the USSR. Carefully researched (better than most) and well-written

The Wall designed by Maya Lin, then a 21 year-old student at Yale is one of the most visited monument in Washington, DC. If the war was controversial, the winning design also caused quite a stir nationwide. Arguments erupted against this "black gash of shame". The controversy was resolved by adding a bronze statue and a flagpole.

The book is a pictorial testimony of the millions of people who came by to remember the fallen and to reminisce the past. These are either parents, wives, children, veterans, friends, or visitors who came to pay tribute to those who sacrificed themselves in the name of FREEDOM.

They are gone, but live forever in our hearts.

Empathy and love helped create this sensitive photographic study of the Viet Nam War Memorial. One cannot view each stunning photograph without emotion and deep gratitude. This book still remains on our bookshelf so we will always remember. This is a heart-felt offering.

This is not a novel and the facts are often understated. It is easy to read, told in an honest and matter of fact way. Too bad it wasn't available to be read by every American before our own Vietnam experience. Now there are hundreds of true stories written by Americans with the same tragic sense that could have been avoided. It is the story of war and what a nurse must go through. You feel like you know Elizabeth well by the end of the book and would want her there for you and as a friend.

"War Without A Front" is an excellent memoir of a young French army nurse during the earlier years of the Vietnam conflict. Madame Sevier's depiction of the culture of the Vietnamese,the sorrows of war and the great personal suffering that was experienced is very well portrayed in this novel. Her commitment to duty for her country along with her heroic courage to care for those injured reflects strongly upon her character and determination to serve the country she loved regardless of the personal cost. Madame Sevier's writing style allows you to feel first hand the anxieties and frustrations shared by everyone as if you were beside her every step of the way.

A fine memoir of a Vietnam veteran. My brother met the author and secured a signed copy for me which I immediately devoured. It is highly readable and engrossing. I especially enjoyed the attention to language; specifically the terms and names. Merritt uses them effectively to put us into his time and environment.

Bill Merritt's account of his service with the 65th Engineer Battalion, 25th Division, in 1968, never got the attention it deserved, but it is one of the best memoir-style books to have emerged from the Vietnam War. The writing is rich and layered, the dialogue utterly real, the stories frank and fascinating. Highly recommended for anyone interested in what Vietnam was like for a junior enlisted man, and a must for any serious reader of Vietnam War literature.

This is a marvelous memoir of a young girl's surviving in Burma during the years leading up to and during World War II. Details are remembered with astonishing clarity and sharpness, the characters of those around her are quietly drawn, and the author stands forth as a bright child full of curiosity, resilience, and determination.

As the Japanese forces advance, young Maureen is left in a Catholic boarding school by her parents, a Burmese woman married to an Irish colonial administrator. Deprived of her mother's affection and language, she finds herself with a couple of British girls in the care of the Italian nuns who run the school, although speaking neither English nor Italian. When the Japanese military occupation arrives, with fairly dire effects, the author observes and describes the enemy soldiers with the same dispassionate clarity that she sees her teachers and companions. At the end of the War she is returned to her paternal grandmother in Ireland where the extreme culture shock after her life in Burma is dealt with briefly. The reader's heart yearns for her to be given the love and affection she has been deprived of during the War, but it is not forthcoming, yet the ending is neither bitter nor depressing. Clearly, the author has lived to become a successful person and parent in her own right, in Great Britain.

All this needs to become a terrific movie is dialogue to be added (there isn't very much--my only reason for not giving it 5 stars). The background is described sufficiently for the set-makers to get right to work building them.

To current discussions of racism and racial conflict, this adds an unusual Anglo-Burmese perspective.

This is an autobiographical jewell! I lived in Burma as a teenager from late 1958 to mid-1962 and am familiar with the history and cultural crosscurrents that are interwoven so skillfully throughout Maureen Baird-Murray's focused and economical, but never dull text. One does not,however, need such a background to appreciate the work, although watching "Empire of the Sun" on a video is good preparation for the "World Overturned" part of it.

Born in the Shan States of Burma to an Anglo-Irish (Portestant) father of the Burma Frontier Service and a Burmese Buddhist mother, Maureen is, for her first 5 years, raised essentially as a happy Burmese child knowing only the Burmese language, which she and her parents speak exclusively. Disturbing things happen in her life and she is packed off to a convent run, ironically, by an order of Italian nuns who force her to speak only English and sort of cold-forge her into a more European type of young lady.

After the Japanese occupy Burma, she loses contact with her parents, and for three and a half years (1942-1945) lives a rather hardscrabble life with the nuns, whose Italian nationality shields them from the worst of the brutalities which the invaders exacted upon Europeans who had to stay behind. Following liberation, by then an adolescent, she discovers the fate of her parents and a story of heartbreaking betrayal. Nevertheless, ultimately reclaimed by friends of her father just before Burma's independance from Britain, she is taken away to a new homeland with its own astonishing revelations.

This story could be a soap opera script, but it is not so. The author has just cause for great resentment, but she evinces nothing of the kind. Rather, in the delightful reminiscences of a child's perspective of a Burma socity that is long gone, including the hurtful and the humorous parts in rapid succession, Maureen Baird-Murray reveals a thoughtful appraisal of her own personal experiences, and a compassionate, forgiving character.

Although limited in the period it covers, with leap to when the author is an adult, "A World Overturned" is likely the best autobiographical account ever written to date by the child of a mixed marriage in colonial Burma. Always a page-turner, it is informative, gripping, sometimes heart-rending, but ultimately soul satisfying.

I found this book to be very interesting. Kelly includes a rich description of Vietnam and her people.

Katie Kelly went back to Vietnam to work with the half American street kids of Saigon. She was a friend to them and tried to teach them English. In her book she chronicles their life histories and what it meant to live in a society where taunting by their fellow students drove most of them out of school after five years or less. Her year in Saigon and her subsequent efforts on behalf of those lost Americans reveals what a decent human being she is. Would that we would have more like her.

I loved this book. A wonderful example of personal travel writing--a very personal memoir. In addition to beautifully describing the countryside, some of her insights were quite interesting--the lack of privacy in the culture, the obedience to authority. Her appreciation of and eventual conversion to Buddhism helped me really understand in a very different way the nature of this most un-western form of spirituality. I too was a little disappointed in the second half of the book where her falling in love interferes with the very compelling story of ethnic tensions, and I did think the ending was a bit of a cop out--"oh,well--cultural differences"--unexplained reason for her separation. Still, having been to Nepal and seeing just a glimpse of the things she writes about, a must read for people visiting that part of the world.

Jamie writes a beautiful account of Bhutan & it's people. And although she would like to believe that it is an ideal existence - a shangri la, she soon realises that every country has it's own unique problems. This however does not prevent Jamie from falling in love with Bhutan & the way of life. After adjusting to living with no electricity, no running water, a drastic change in diet, language problems & the local bus aptly named the 'vomit comet', Jamie's mind finally arives in Bhutan. Gradually, through letters to her boyfriend she finds a widening gap between her new life & life in Canada. So much so that on returning home for a visit, she finds her former life to be a complete culture shock & shortens her stay.

Her tales of the school children in the village of Pema Gatshel are both amusing & heartwarming. This is a society where children revere their teachers. Jamies acknoledges that that these children have taught her a lot more than she was able to teach them.

A must for anyone with an interest in Bhutan, the Himalayan region, Buddhism & teaching in a foreign country.

I just finished reading this book, and thought it was wonderful! It was especially good to read because I just recently moved to Romania and am going through some of the same experiences that the author discribed. Culture shock, language, trying to teach students without the words to communicate with them (I haven't had anyone tell me that their birthday is "It is rice and pork," yet [p. 43], but I could definitely relate to that story!), all of these are common struggles in a new land.

One of the best parts of the book for me was the way the author managed to combine a description of the history of Bhutan and her own personal experiences. I love reading history and culture books, but reading about history by experiencing it through someone else's eyes made it all come alive again. I loved how Zeppa brings the reader slowly through ever-spiraling circles deeper and deeper into the culture. The way she carefully described her arrival in the country, her original culture shock and despair, and the gradual love she gained for her new people are very well-crafted. It gives the reader the chance to experience the same gradual love of Bhutan, its culture, people, and landscape. She also managed to do so with a good sense of humor, laughing about things such as rats having a Rat Olympics while she was trying to sleep, or the reverse culture shock of having sliced bread after so many months in what originally seemed to her to be extremely spartan living conditions. I've read many travel books and memoirs, but I have to say that this is one of my all-time favorites.

I also appreciated the author's honesty, both about the good and the bad decisions she made and things she experienced. Here I have to take issue with some of the other reviewers. In fact, I have to wonder if they've ever lived in a country besides their native land (as well as wondering how they would fare with the Rat Olympics, lack of electricity, unfamiliar food, and lack of connection to their first native land). I found Zeppa's description of culture shock to be extremely accurate. As humans we have the built-in characteristic of believing on a certain fundamental level that the way we know things is "right". Living in other cultures can change that to a certain degree, but it never goes away. Some days (especially in the beginning) you wonder why you ever decided to come to this stupid country and when the next plane home is. Other days you love this wonderful new country, can't believe you ever lived anywhere else, and can't imagine why anyone would ever live life differently than people do in your new home. Most days are somewhere in-between. Through a great deal of work you can try to view both your old and new cultures objectively, but this is very hard. I felt that Zeppa did an amazing job with this; she was definitely not perfect, but she wrestled with her decisions before making them and remained constantly open to new ideas and interpretations of what she saw, which is more than most people can do. To me, this was one of this book's main strengths. I loved this book and would recommend it to people interested in learning about another culture. I would also recommend it to people who are going to be living in a new country to give them an idea of what culture shock can be like. Although most culture shock won't be as severe (Canada to Bhutan is one of the biggest cultural changes available on our planet at the moment), this is still an excellent view of what adjustment can be like. If nothing else, I know that I will remember this book so that when my culture shock gets worse ("I don't understand what she just said... This new climate is hard to get used to!... Why do they do things THAT way here?" etc.) I can know I'm in good company.

If you've traveled through SE Asia and find amusement in those expats who have been on the road a bit too long, marveling at their ability to lead lives without a moral compass or care in the world, this book is for you.

Gilboa weaves funny and well-written accounts of expats in Phnom Penh whom many would regard as having "lost it" --accustomed to recreational heroin use, $2 prostitutes and daily bribery. Many of them cannot readjust back to their old lives in the west, a feeling many a traveler can relate to after having been to such developing places as Cambodia.

The book reinforces the saying that truth is stranger (and I would add amusing) than fiction. Gilboa also describes accurately the comic absurdity and pathetic state that Cambodia is today -- politically and day-to-day life.

Overall a hilarious, lighthearted look at the "wild west" mentality of modern Phnom Penh, with an informing overview of Cambodia's modern political history.

One last note: If you've (a) never been to a developing country such as Cambodia and (b) are scared by drug use and prostitution, you may find this book more disturbing than amusing.

A book that delves into what other writers prefer not to discuss which is the dark side of Cambodia from an ex-pat's perspective. Having been to Cambodia numerous times, what he writes about is very much true. The contradictions of horror and beauty, gentleness and brutality, love and exploitation do exist in that battered country. Yes the book does focus on the lurid and sensational but it does capture the surreal quality of Cambodia that makes it magical in both a light and dark sense.

Cambodia and the people within it fail to be easily classified as being good or evil. There's a dark side that lurks in us all but Amit to his credit can see the positive within the people he writes about.

This is not the book to learn about why these things are but its a fairly fun read about what is being hailed as the 90's Casablanca-Phnom Penh. As unique as his book is, there is still much about Phnom Penh that he does not capture or discuss but at least he makes an attempt to describe the on-the-edge lifestyle of what draws westerners into the country. What he does lack is a perspective on what local Cambodians and Vietnamese think but that would be a different book entirely.

Cambodia is my favorite country and aside from the picture photography books of Angkor Wat and the people of Phnom Penh, few books seems to even come close to the impressionsitic nuances of what makes the Country and its people so magical (and that includes the westerners, khmers, and the vietnamese).

What he writes about is not hyperbole or fiction but in his narrow focus is definitely biased in a good sense. I didn't want a dry clinical account but a depiction of the people and events that have created a community that both he and I find fascinating.

As a Thai raised in Bangkok and educated in NYC, I thought I had seen it all. But working in Phnom Penh threw even me for a loop. What's great about Off the Rails is that it captures the anarchy that Phnom Penh is full of. And Gilboa captures the essence of the sexed out, drugged out foreigners that we see all the time in Thailand and who now have "discovered" Cambodia. Off the Rails doesn't dwell on the mundane aspects of Phnom Penh, but goes straight to the heart of the story. I read the book in one sitting. It's funny some of the "professional journalists" (who haven't published any books on Cambodia) on this site complain about the writing. But the straightforward style works really well for this story. I suppose it wasn't written like (yawn) the New York Times would have. But maybe that's the whole point. I do wish that Gilboa could have included more about the Cambodians. Anyway, I hope he writes another book, but this one about the terrible things that go on in places like Thailand's own Pattaya.

Lewis Sorley, in his book "A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam", makes the boldest statement that I have heard or read regarding the Vietnam War. On page 217 Sorley writes, "There came a time when the war was won. The fighting wasn't over, but the war was won. This achievement can probably best be dated in late 1970..." This is a very provocative statement considering what we know the final result of the Vietnam War to be.

With "A Better War" Sorley attempts to portray America's last years in Vietnam, a time period from roughly the emergence of Creighton Abrams right before he took command to when we pulled out, as a time when America held within its grasp, if not victory in Vietnam, then at least the potential for the same strategic stalemate we achieved in Korea. Sorley details how this victory slipped through our fingers as a result of political reverses at home and not military reverses in Indochina.

While saying that we had the war won may not be entirely accurate, we were certainly doing better than what has been portrayed in most accounts of the war. We were approaching our ultimate goal of creating a viable nation state out of South Vietnam that would be a bulwark against the spread of communism in southeast Asia. It is Sorley's belief that we had mostly achieved that goal by late 1970.

Sorley seems to think that the main reason we faired so poorly in Vietnam was because of failed tactics at the beginning of the conflict. He faults William Westmoreland for not paying enough attention to Vietnamese forces and by employing a strategic plan that was more interested in killing the enemy than in providing a secure environment for the Vietnamese people.

Sorley also believes that a combination of civil unrest over Vietnam and biased reporting by the media, especially Walter Cronkite, was the main contributing factor in America losing the war. President Nixon was unwilling to expend the political capital to be able to undertake the necessary military actions that would bring the North Vietnamese to their knees. Each new "escalation" of the conflict brought ever stronger rebuke upon Nixon until he just stopped fighting against it and made the fateful decision to withdraw all American troops whether the South Vietnamese were ready to accept all the responsibility or not.

The end of the Vietnam War is easily America's most shameful moment. It is so not because we fought there or even because we didn't achieve our objective. It is our national shame because of the way in which we bailed out on a people who were totally dependent upon us for their freedom and their lives. Without American assistance the South Vietnamese didn't stand a chance against the North Vietnamese onslaught. The American president knew this, the Congress knew this, and, worse yet, the people knew this and they just didn't care.

The worst thing that was ever said by an American about the war was said by President Gerald Ford. At a time when North Vietnamese soldiers were overrunning the South Vietnamese countryside, terrorizing and killing the people at will, Ford said during a speech he was giving at Tulane University, "As far as the United States is concerned, the war in Vietnam is finished." Yes, President Ford, the war may be over but America's shame from abandoning the Vietnamese people will never go away.

Vietnam has always been characterised as a big mistake that was a lost cause from the get-go! Sorley shows that it was winnable, and was in fact, won; if we had only stayed the course.

The telling comment that should give all Americans pause; is that the Russians and Communist Chinese proved to be more reliable allies to North Vietnam than the USA was for South Vietnam.

No war is perfect or is perfectly managed; but this one, as Sorley shows, was winnable had our country not caved in to the war protestors, negative assessments by the media and self-serving politicians. Had we stayed the course, South Vietnam would now be free and vibrant rather than the economic basket case it is under the communists.

I'm thankful that historians like Lewis Sorley are now telling the true story of the Vietnam War. I only hope this book is read by all objective minded Americans.

This well researched book answers some of the questions I had about Robert McNamara's book (Argument Without End) by examining the 1972 offensive and its use of newer sources (such as DeForest). I personally interviewed many of the NVA who particiapted in the An Loc offensive. Later I heard from a well placed source that the NVA was within days of a surrender during the bombing. Others have discredited that story, but one wonders if it were true or not.

I hope that Sorley has the opportunity to read more of the Vietnamese literature and to talk to the Vietnamese. IF is always open to speculation, but one wonders if a victory of the south in 75 would have ended it. I don't think so.

However, it is difficult to support the idea that the war could not be won. After all, we did much better in Korea. Can someone explain why it was so different in Vietnam?

I greatly enjoyed this sly, somewhat disorganized, tongue in cheek discussion of perhaps-the-most-famous-volcanoe-yet. Winchester is clearly highly knowledgeable about various aspects of geology & writes in a way that made this layman really want to go out & learn more. His endless tangents and footnotes were almost always entertaining and worthwhile forays into new knowledge, and while they did break up the stream of narrative at times they also served to humanize what is otherwise a truly Humongous event. The book does an excellent job with scale -one actually gets a sense of just how big things were, from explosions to tsunamis- and the eye-witness accounts of the aftermath of the eruption were truly horrific. Some of the early speculation on the possible impact of a pre-Krakatoa Krakatoa Event seemed to be on (dare I say it?) shaky ground, but when Winchester cuts to the know historical record of the eruption he seems rock solid. I felt that the attempt to "bring the book up to the present minute" by discussing the putative impact of Krakatoa on the rise of Islamic extremism in Indonesia & the hint that the bombing in Bali last year might be yet another (cultural) aftershock of the eruption a bit forced (If you ever do a second edition Simon, I'd kill that whole chapter). These complaints aside I frankly couldn't put the book down, went straight back to school & recommended it to my students & friends & will be watching for Winchester's next production with cheerful anticipation.

'Popular Science' has a slightly pejorative ring to it that is undeserved, as good examples serve to increase general awareness and dispel urban myths - this book is one of those good examples.
Written in Mr. Winchester's energetic, entertaining style, this book is well-researched and peppered with neat little snippets of information and pertinent anecdotes, backed up with solid evidence.

He goes into much historical detail about the East Indies and its importance in world trade and politics during the run-up to the cataclysmic explosion that devastated the island.
One quibble; in extolling the virtues of Batavia, he forgets that the place was reviled by seamen in the 18th C (Anson, Cook, Dampier, Davis et al) as a suffocating hell-hole of disease, stench and filth.

He examines the explosion of scientific theories that arose in the aftermath of the event, and the small part he played in proving that plate tectonics works (the chapter on The Wallace Line contains the most lucid crash course on plate tectonics I've seen).

Most of this has been said before, but the difference here is he attributes the area's political and religious changes directly to the explosion.

Some of this information seems extraneous to the main thrust of the book, (e,g, Wallace and Darwin), but it has a purpose ... It serves to underline the tremendous, slow forces that drive plate tectonics (unheard of then), and the devastating results of any blockage.

Given all this background data it should come as no surprise to learn that Krakatoa has exploded many times in the geologically recent past (60,000 years), and most assuredly will in the future.
Eruptions are an everyday occurence, but this gigantic 'throat-clearing' was the first global-scale event to be reported within minutes of it happening, and Mr. Winchester draws on many first-hand accounts to describe in horrendous detail the titanic scale of the event.

The explosion shook the world to its core, both physically and metaphorically; long-held beliefs of the solidity of the Earth and Man's significance were blown away. Religious and scientific establishments had to re-think their stances; but amazingly, some still clung (and cling now!) to the old immutable doctrines, even in the light of such solid evidence.
The sterile islands that formed in the wake of the explosion were a clean sheet for Nature, and observations of new life colonising them became the new focus of scientific study, in a less human-controlled way than E.O. Wilson did in the Florida Keys.

As with most of Mr. Winchester's books, this is a very instructive and entertaining read, thoughtfully & thankfully containing an appendix on further reading, which I recommend to any popular science/history fan. *****

This is a well written well researched book that I enjoyed very much. I loved reading about the geography, geology, history, and legacy of the world's most destructive volcano. The creation of the news agency Reuters and the telegraph machine with the advent of Morse Code helped the spread the news of this disaster to the world within moments of the eruption in 1883. I also learned that the Dutch enslaved the people of Java for over two centuries. The rebellion by the Indonesians against the Dutch was ignited by the eruption of Krakatoa and is detailed well in this book. Indonesia now has the largest population of people of Islamic faith in the world because of Dutch rule. Winchester does an excellent job of describing the devastation Krakatoa caused as more than 35,000 people died mostly as the result of the 60 mile a hour tidal waves the eruption caused.

The cause of the eruption of Krakatoa in the book is very complex. It is a process called subduction in which a heavier and colder tectonic plate collides with a lighter warmer one. There are many helpful drawings and captions to describe the technical geological concepts. Winchester even rates volcanos with an explosivity index which is based on the amount of material ejected in an eruption and the height the material reaches in the air. I found these concepts about volcanos to be very interesting.

There is a lot of information in this book, and it should be read slowly to understand and appreciate it. If you like to read books about history and earth science, or geography you will enjoy this book.