QUICK REVIEW: With such an intense story, you wish the merely average writing could measure up to the events it records. But the writing is the only thing that holds this book back. You will find yourself stunned at both the horrific treatment of the POW's and at the POW's strength to overcome it. This is an eye-opening book worth reading.

FULL REVIEW: Sam Johnson gives a first hand account of what it was like to be a POW in North Vietnam. He gives a lot of details which gives the reader a full picture of the conditions and events that happened inside the prison. We follow his story through seven years of imprisonment but, unlike other POW stories, the events do not get monotonous with the same thing happening the same way all the time. Instead the account gets the readers attention and holds it through the entire book. He describes the activities of the prison with enough feeling and fear for the reader to feel his pain and determination to survive. The story is related to us from one agonizing event to another with the amazing strength of the prisoners' resolve to persevere throughout. At times the writing gets too involved in the political events surrounding the war, or else strays off to other personal stories, but generally the story still pushes through with enough interest. It is written with the desire to "tell the story" more than it is to impress the reader with the style of writing. Despite those few setbacks the book is hard-hitting and worth reading, especially for anyone interested in POW stories.

While I would never claim to understand what Sam Johnson went through, I can't imagine a book doing a better job of expressing what it's like to be a POW than this one did. The description of his experiences was detailed without being tedious, and the book was both disturbing and uplifing -- disturbing due to the brutality of Johnson's captors, but uplifting because of his faith and optimism.

I've also read "Faith Of My Fathers", but I enjoyed "Captive Warriors" quite a bit more. In my opinion, FOMF wasn't as effective at describing the POW experience, and while I don't intend to diminish what McCain went through, it seems apparent that his treatment was nowhere near as harsh as Johnson's.

A previous reviewer implied that the references to Johnson's faith in God were numerous to the point of being excessive, but I didn't find that to be the case at all. I don't recall the point having been made more than a few times, and certainly not in a gratuitous manner.

My only complaint about this book is that it didn't contain more information about Johnson's life after the war. He is continuing to serve his country, currently as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. After reading this biography, I'm hoping that he will consider pursuing a higher office, and maybe then he'll have enough material for a second book.

When Sam Johnson was shot down over Vietnam, he was badly injured in the bailout. He survived years of solitary confinement and extreme torture with his body broken yet his resolve firm. His story of his faith in God, his fellow prisoners, and the Code of Conduct is remarkable. We Americans owe Mr. Johnson and the other courageous POW's our undying gratitude.

As a former Marine Sniper who served two tours in Nam and who is still trying to understand what I went through this is an okay read. Not as good as some and a bit over blown at times but worth understanding the other side. It does make you want to better understand the other side of our current crisis in terrorism and see what makes them tick. Our leaders in Nam were a little lazy and self serving when it came to history. That is the leaders in Washington. Makes you wonder what might have been?

As a North Vietnamese colonel and high ranking Party member, the author accepted the surrender of Saigon on April 1975. He continued to work for Hanoi until 1990, when disillusioned with the communists he moved to Paris and hoped to see a free and democratic Vietnam.

In his memoir, he talked about communism being elevated to the rank of a "blind faith", the purges within the Party, the errors, greed, and corruption of communist leaders, the "arrogance of the Party" and so on.

This book is recommended to those who are interested in the inner world of the Vietnamese communist Party and the causes of its failure. It is not the ideal world painted by the communists, not the people's rule but the rule of five or six men who imposed their dictatorship on the people.

The rarest of gifts -- a credible account from a Vietnamese communist cadre! Bui Tin has done a great service to all of his countrymen, regardless political faction or religion. His assessments of legendary Vietnamese cadres, including Ho Chi Minh, Le Duan and Le Duc Anh are stunningly frank. Those interested in Vietnam or Cambodia should place this title on the top of their reading lists. There is simply no other work of its kind, although we can always hope that another courageous figure will follow in the author's footsteps.

More BS from a true red commie. One fails to mention the 1950 conference in Moscow with Stalin, Mao, and Uncle Ho where they plotted the war. This imbessile's lies are completely refuted by Vietnam: The Necessary War. This book is selective history. Not all factors that lead into and event are represented, only hogwash from a nostalgic hippie. He is the part of the same group of people that distorted the infamous napalm burned girl picture. That girl was hit by napalm from an aircraft piloted by a South Vietnamese pilot in where also a few ARVN soldiers were killed. But for some reason nuts like this guy called it American barbarism. His ilk also left out the caption the South Vietnamese photgrapher wrote on the bottom of the picture.

"This never would have happened if the Communists stayed in the North."

As a Vietnamese living in America, I have always been puzzled by different historical accounts of what went on during the Vietnam war. One account was what I learnt while growing up there. Another account was the Vietnam that many Americans know from the media. This book explained some of those differences well. The two Viet Nam (North and South), the gulf of Ton Kin incidence, the liberal press, antiwar activists spitting on returning GI, and the emotionally afflicting POW/MIA myth were the few fabrications concocted by various imperialistic American administrations. With the help of the jingoistic corporate press, they brainwashed the ill informed American public to garner support for the genocidal war in southeast Asia. Four million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians died from the "good intentions" of the United States.
Americans may have a free press. But are Americans free from the bias, prejudice, and bigotry of men who decide "all the news that's fit to print" and what is fit for us to read? Read the book and make up thy own mind.

This book provides a gripping examination of how the Right has redefined "Vietnam" (a war, not a country). Franklin reviews the horrors inflicted by the United States on the people of Vietnam, and shows how our culture has made us the victims. He shows how the famous photo of the Saigon Chief of Police executing an enemy prisoner has been reversed in movies showing Americans POWs in cages with the gun to their heads. He reminds those who would blame the anti-war movement for our failure, that every President from Truman to Nixon ran as a peace candidate, knowing the American public would never support the war. He discusses the first American anti-Vietnam-war protests, in 1945. Franklin himself was fired from a tenured position at Stanford for his stand against the University's involvement in making napalm, a truly horrific weapon which has only been used against people of color. He reveals that Nixon's need to prolong the war and declare victory by focusing on the Americans unaccounted for (extremely few though they were) led to the creation of the post-war POW/MIA myth. This myth, never substantiated, has justified our refusal to pay Vietnam the reparations we promised in the Paris Peace Treaty and our longstanding lack of diplimatic relations with the country. This book explains the war and its cultural fallout better than anything I've read. Reading this book made me truly alarmed for the lack of democracy in the United States.

i met spike on the north end of vancouver island,...what a guy, what a book,...if you want to read an interesting story of survival from a guys guy ex jet fighter jock there isn't many better than this.
i have read many vietnam POW books, this is one that does'nt wallow in the darkness that was certainly the North Vietnam POW's life,...you will laugh, you will cry,...you might have a hard time putting it down.
i could and should write the book on this guy's life since he wrote this one,...this guy is a real character that lives it on the "edge of the performance envelope",...and does it with panache'. it shines through in this book.

I just wanted to add another viewpoint than the previous reviewer. The language is appropriate for the context of the book. This is explained in the beginning by the Author. His point of view is first person. It is an interesting account of this man's experiences. I found it to be an excellent book. As an afterthought. If you liked the movie Good Will Hunting and the language did not bother you. Then this book is right for you. If you did not like Good Will Hunting because of the language then move on. This is real life in Vietnam and the language is appropriate.

I read this book and was really impressed with the Authors take on his experience as a POW. It is a one of a kind. As a Vietnam Vet of two tours and an Author of my own experiences there this one hit home. Its honest, different, and refreshing. Not to take anything away from anyone who was a prisoner but this guy had an approach and as they say today a paradigm that we would all do well to learn from. Im surprised the book is not more widely distributed but then its not politically correct or down trodden. Its unique as Im sure the Author was and is today. Great book!

The pseudo-scholarly apparatus of quotations and footnotes cannot disguise the true intent of this notorious work of denial literature, which seeks to rehabilitate the radical position on the Vietnam War by systematically whitewashing totalitarian genocide in Indochina. It must be seen in the light of Noam Chomsky's previous writings on Vietnamese communism, whose "achievements" have been "quite remarkable" ("At War With Asia," p282), as demonstrated, presumably, by the brutal purges in which 50,000-100,000 were massacred and 300,000-500,000 starved to death (Robert F. Turner, "Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development," pp142-4).

The book at hand continues these apologetics for communist butchers and mass murderers, asserting that there is "no credible evidence of mass executions" in post-war Vietnam (p62) - only testimony from defector Nguyen Cong Hoan, whom the authors dismiss (pp98-103); from political prisoner Doan Van Toai ("The Vietnamese Gulag"), whom the authors ignore; from torture victim Nguyen Van Coi, whom the authors consign to a footnote (p331n75); from interviews with more than 800 refugees, indicating that 100,000 had been massacred (Jacqueline Desbarats, "Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam," online); from countless victims of the concentration camps where 165,000 died (Orange County Register, April 29, 2001); from humanitarian officials who estimated that communist expulsions had drowned at least 500,000 boat people (Louis Wiesner, "Victims and Survivors: Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Vietnam, 1954-1975," p344); and so on. No credible evidence, indeed.

On Laos, we are treated to extensive displays of indignation over the horrors of war. The sincerity of this humanitarian concern may be deduced from the observation that the communist Pathet Lao made "efforts to achieve a reconciliation" with the mountain tribespeople (p122); these efforts involved a sadistic campaign of genocide which killed 100,000 people (Jane Hamilton-Merritt, "Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942-1992").

On Cambodia, Chomsky and Herman produce some extraordinary apologetics for the Khmer Rouge, offering a figure of only 25,000 killed and claiming that the bloodbath has been exaggerated by a "factor of 100" (p139). They rely on accounts of stage-managed official visits undertaken by credulous Western fellow-travellers, while dismissing the evidence of the victims, on the basis that refugee reports are compromised by "extreme bias" in their selection by the media (pp147-8). They reject any parallel between the killing fields and Nazi Germany, asking whether "a more appropriate comparison is, say, to France after liberation," where tens of thousands of collaborators were massacred "with far less motive for revenge" (p149). They complain that "allegations of genocide" are being used "to whitewash Western imperialism," to distract attention from the "the expanding system of subfascism" and to lay the ideological basis for further Western intervention (pp149-50).

Chomsky and Herman ridicule the idea that the people are "suffering in misery under a savage oppressor bent on genocide," a notion disproved by "common sense" (pp151-2). They argue that if the population is being slaughtered, one would expect "unwillingness to fight for the Paris-educated fanatics at the top," whereas the record indicates that the Cambodian people "have not exactly been awaiting liberation from their oppressors" (p156). Echoing the ideology of the Khmer Rouge, they denounce the country's "urban society" as "a colonial implantation," which the perpetrators "know only as a murderer and a remote oppressor," and thus plainly deserves its fate (p290). In their eyes, the atrocities are a "direct and understandable response to the violence of the imperial system," a suggestion which readers may well interpret as an explicit justification of revolutionary mass slaughter (p291).

Equally noteworthy is the authors' use of source material. Having conceded that the work of Khmer Rouge critic Francois Ponchaud is "serious" and deserves "careful study" (p253), they proceed to denounce him for his "careless and untrustworthy" writing (p274), his "petty deceit" (p280), his "highly unreliable" book (p282), etc. These scruples disappear, however, when the authors rely on Khmer Rouge sympathisers such as Michael Vickery (pp215-22), Ben Kiernan (pp226-30), or Shane Tarr (pp235-40), let alone Gareth Porter and George Hildebrand, whose "carefully documented" study ("Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution") has been "almost entirely ignored" by reviewers and journalists (pp284-5) - perhaps because it was based largely on Khmer Rouge press releases.

In the space available it is possible to document only a few of the falsifications of facts and evidence in these pages. Perhaps the most striking example is the authors' libel of the Cambodian refugee Pin Yathay, whose classic memoir ("Stay Alive, My Son") offers a detailed account of the unimaginable horrors of the Khmer Rouge dictatorship which destroyed his family. Chomsky and Herman refer, without further discussion, to a letter in a foreign newspaper which defames Yathay as a CIA-sponsored drug dealer (pp143-4). Needless to say, no supporting evidence whatsoever is offered for this scurrilous allegation from an anonymous source, which the authors uncritically deploy for the purpose of smearing a bereaved father and genocide survivor. One is reminded of the neo-Nazi attempts to discredit the diary of Anne Frank.

As Stephen J. Morris noted in a crushing review essay ("Chomsky on US Foreign Policy," Harvard International Review, December-January 1981), the object of this disgraceful exercise cannot be to convince the reader that the arguments offered are actually true. Rather, the goal is to affect the reader's emotional attitude, by dulling his or her sense of outrage on contemplating millions of tortured and mutilated corpses brought about by the radical movement which campaigned for a communist victory in Indochina. In this task, the book is eminently successful, not unlike the works of Holocaust denial which serve as its echo and mirror image.

Ensconced in the ivory tower of American academia, neither Noam Chomsky nor Edward Herman would have survived day one of Cambodia's infamous "Year Zero" - an "agrarian reform" that led to the deaths of roughly two million people - one quarter of the population of Cambodia.

Luckily for Chomsky, the governor of Massachusetts (Chomsky is a linguistics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA) did not summarily round up, torture, convict and execute the intelligensia and bourgeois classes in Massachusetts. Sadly for Cambodia (or Kampuchea, if you prefer) Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge government did just this in Cambodia. Under the rule of the Khmer Rouge, the "crime" of being an elementary school teacher, to say nothing of being a tenured university professor!, was excuse enough for the revolutionary heroes Chomsky sings the praises of in "After The Cataclysm", to kill you and your entire family.

Chomsky's book fails in every conceivable way when analyzing the bloody regime of Pol Pot, attempting to write off refugee reports of the unimaginably large scale atrocities as the spin of an imperialist media seeking to defame the agrarian revolution. Chomsky could not have been more wrong, nor proved more valuable a western mouthpiece for one of the most brutal dictators in living memory.

The fiery anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism polemics and philippics that were Chomsky's milieu during the Vietnam war pigeonholed his analysis of the Pol Pot regime, and it shows in this book. After his bitter condemnations of anything even vaguely pro-American in Asian politics, Chomsky had ideologially painted himself into a corner. Rather than renounce one ounce of his invective, he instead wrote this book, which regardless of intent, reads as an apologist eulogy to the Khmer Rouge.

I give this book five stars because it's a five star work on the excesses of the old guard left in American academic circles, and a lingering stench on Chomsky's reputation. Had Chomsky had the integrity and courage to admit that the emperor Pol Pot had no clothes on, this book never would have been written....The disingenuousness presented in "After The Cataclysm" is nearly too astounding, as if written as a savage and bitter satire of professional academics-cum-polemicists. It's not, and academia is left tarnished for it.

A book that begs us to call into serious question the nature of the society in which we, live. Using examples from postwar Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, it presents the broader issue, of "how our system really works": Government, media, and such.

If there is ever a study of all the shameful efforts to belittle the crimes of communism, this book will occupy a prominent place. Vickery claims that there were only 740,000 deaths under the Khmer Rouge during 1975-9. How does he reach this number, which is half the size of other estimates and only a third of the true figure? He combines a low population count of 7.1 million in 1975 with a massively inflated sum of 6.7 million in 1979, producing a demographic decline of only 400,000. No credible source has given such a drastic underestimate.

In the 15 years since this book was first published, Vickery has made no effort to include the demographic studies which refute his conclusions. He has nothing to say about Marek Sliwinski's analysis, which calculates losses of 1.9-2.5 million, most likely 2.16 million ("Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique," p40). He has nothing to say about the Documentation Center of Cambodia, which has shown that 1.5 million were massacred and 2-3 million killed overall (Craig Etcheson, "Quantifying Crimes Against Humanity in Cambodia," online). In short, this new edition contains nothing to inform the reader that Vickery's claims are indefensible.

Vickery derides what he calls the "Standard Total View" of Cambodia, namely the assumption that the Khmer Rouge carried out a systematic campaign of genocide in pursuance of their fanatical Marxist ideology. In place of the Standard Total View, he claims that the Khmer Rouge leadership "did not foresee, let alone plan," the bloodbath which they inflicted: "They were petty bourgeois radicals overcome by peasantist romanticism" (p287). His conclusion is based on oral testimony gathered from 92 Cambodian refugees in a Thai refugee camp during 1980. Only nine of these interviewees are women and just one is a peasant. Given that the book purports to explain the motives and conduct of the Cambodian peasants, this is a shocking lapse from accepted standards of scholarship.

Unfortunately for Vickery's position, the Standard Total View is clearly correct. Had Vickery devoted space to Lenin's misnamed policy of War Communism, he would have been able to cite the research of numerous economic historians (e.g. Boris Brutzkus, Lancelot Lawton, Alexander Baykov, T.J.B. Hoff) who agree that it was a conscious effort to eliminate the market economy, resulting in a famine which killed 5 million people. Had Vickery explored other examples - such as Mao's Great Leap Forward, in which 30 million died (Jasper Becker, "Hungry Ghosts") - he could have explained why the Khmer Rouge described their plan as the "Super Great Leap Forward" (Tung Padevat, June 1976). He might have seen that the division of the population into class categories - some of which are targeted for destruction - is consistent with other Marxist revolutions and cannot be attributed to peasant populism. But research of this kind can hardly be expected in a work of political dogma.

Vickery is so determined to absolve communism that he even considers it "fortunate" that "those who predicted a predominance of agrarian nationalism over Marxism in China and Vietnam were mistaken" (p290). He does not mention that the good fortune of the Chinese people includes the slaughter of tens of millions through massacre, slavery and forced famine (Washington Post, July 17-18, 1994). Nor does he inform his readers that North Vietnam massacred 50,000-100,000 before reunification, with 300,000-500,000 starved to death (Robert F. Turner, "Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development," pp142-4); or that its post-war crimes included the massacre of 100,000 South Vietnamese civilians (Jacqueline Desbarats, "Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam," online); the murder of 165,000 in concentration camps (Orange County Register, April 29, 2001); and the mass expulsions which drowned 500,000 boat people (Louis Wiesner, "Victims and Survivors: Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Vietnam, 1954-1975," p344). The facts being inconvenient, Vickery simply deletes them from history.

Those who wish to read a discussion of the Khmer Rouge period by responsible experts should consult Craig Etcheson, "The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea;" Karl D Jackson, ed., "Cambodia, 1975-1978: Rendezvous With Death" or Jean-Louis Margolin, "Cambodia: The Country of Disconcerting Crimes" in Stephane Courtois, ed., "The Black Book of Communism" (pp577-636). The history of scholarly apologetics on this subject is discussed in Sophal Ear's online thesis, "The Khmer Rouge Canon: 1975-1979 - The Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia."

I read a number of books, trying to understand what Pol Pot was all about. Most make him out to be satan incarnate, or otherwise incomprehensible. This is the one book that made the history of his regime reasonably comprehensible to me. Highest recommendation.

Michael Vickery, always ready and perhaps even ever-anxious to attack anyone else who has studied Cambodia, shares some unique insights and valuable experience gained in Cambodia in the 1960s. While most of the arguments about the goings on inside Cambodia during the DK and PRK eras are now dated, readers can still learn much from "Cambodia 1975-1982". Early into this book, Vickery very cleverly uses passages from Bun Chan Mol's excellent book "Chareut Khmer" to catch off guard those readers who assume crimes against humanity in Cambodia began in the DK era. That passage alone makes the book worthwhile.

I had such high hopes for this book. The concept was a fine one: Follow the exploits of the members of a single company that served in the Vietnam war. Apparently, this project was initiated by the Newsweek magazine and the result of that first effort was a series of awards for excellent reportage. The authors attempted to expand the project for publication in book form. Unfortunately, the scope of the project is so large and unwieldly that the result is a major disappointment. The reason for this is that so many different people were required to compile the information of such a large number of people that the text has the feel of a third hand account written from a translation. In other words, it reads like a committee report. Thus, it is difficult to form any strong opinions or acheive insight because there is no internal logic which governs the book. Plus, many of the soldiers' stories seem to have been concoctions of incidents taken from a dozen different events. Much of the personal information about the soldiers seems, well, impersonal. If you would like to experience a successful execution of the concept, read the book 'Survivors' by Zalin Grant. In it he covers the POW lives of a dozen U.S. prisoners and he does it brilliantly. You will put that book down feeling that you have read something very original and very meaningful.

Best book I know of telling about the combat soldier there in Vietnam. Interestingly, I am one of those combat soldiers. It really helped me to get a handle on what happen there. Only problem it caused me to want to got back and go I have, seven times now. Probably go again soon. Curtis Gilliland,Jr. C 2/28 1st Infantry 68-69

This is the story of several men who served with Charlie Company. Each man tells about his tour and each man tells about what happened after he arrived home. This book is a great read and a real eye-opener.

Jan has taken the reader into the cockpit with the Forward Air Controller. She has translated the various stories into a well organized history of what this mission was all about and tells the story of the pilots who flew at tree top level to direct airstrikes in Southeast Asia. It puts me back into my O-2 and I can re-live my experiences as a FAC all over again.

I know Jan Churchill, in fact bought an 0-1 birdog from her'wonderful airplane. She has put together an exhaustive, and accurate account of the development of Forward Air Control, Tactics, Equipment, Procedurees, and History. I was a Forward Air Controller in Vietnam, North and South, also flew in Laos with 324 missions total. She taught me many facets of the FAC business I did not know. I would consider her an expert in this field.,

Jan has done an outstanding job telling the slow and fast FAC stories from SEA. I am proud to recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn more about forward air controller operations durng the Vietnam War.

At 120 pages (5" x 7") and approximately 20,000 words, this book is so short that it is really more like an illustrated essay.
However, it is well-written and illustrated with good color photographs on every page. Beginning with the geographical situation and early origins of the Khmer empire, successive chapters take the story through the foundation of Angkor by Jayavarman II (800 AD), the construction of Angkor Wat by Suryavarman II (1113-1150), the iconic "face temples" of Angkor's Buddhist king, Jayavarman VII (1181-1219), and the post-Angkor period (14th-15th centuries). The book concludes with twenty pages of excerpts from other works, including the diary of Zhou Daguan (Chinese envoy to Angkor in 1296-7) and several inscriptions. The emphasis throughout is on cultural developments and the building programs of the kings at Angkor.

Because the size and format of this book may mislead some readers to expect a "guidebook" to Angkor, it is worth emphasizing that this is a history rather than a site guide. However, it does include a map of Angkor that usefully identifies the most important structures and the reigns in which they were built.

Because the book is so very short, the amount of information that could be included is necessarily limited. It seems that the most likely audience for the book includes: (1) those who are unfamiliar with ancient Cambodia and wish a brief introduction, and (2) elementary and secondary education, where the book would be suitable as a learning module on SE Asia.

Wonderful small little book that contains information about the origins of Angkor that once the ancient Khmer former capital from the 9th-15 century A.D. The book contains wonderful photographs from old photo archives and some from art galleries. Those who have help to make this book have gone to extraordinary lengths to get the right details as well has translations from steles and inscriptions praising the great works the ancient powerful god kings of many centuries ago. This is rare because most books on Angkor that I have read don't usually have translations or excerpts of inscriptions whatso ever. Seeing the photos of temples and ruins buried in the jungle for centuries is enough to make me want to understand more about the Khmers and their ancient civilization of centuries ago. What has happened to their art which is still a question of who owns it since there temples are plundered for their wonderful carvings of stone etc... Yet the book is great to have small and easy to read and talks about royal powerful from the founder of Angkor right through to the classical age which was the height of it's power in the 12th century A.D. with the famous construction of Angkor Wat the symbol to the Khmer people of the past and present through to the decline and instability of Angkor during the last few decades before it was abandoned. With wonderful photographs and drawings, maps and artifacts this book is just one of the many great books published about Angkor.

The book is very nice done,with beutiful pictures and illustrations. One thing that I mised was the concentration to Cambodia, very little was mentioned about for example the big sites in Thailand.However it's worth the money just for the nice pictures.

Shockingly, none of the official reviews of this book note that it is a racist, Christian supremisist tract, expressly intended to convert the people of Laos to "the teachings of Jesus Christ." The book is critical of all non-Christian religious beliefs, as well as Catholic beliefs, and encourages readers to go to pray for the people of Laos to become Christians and go to Laos as a missionary to convert the various ethnic groups, who the authors believe are tragically headed for Hell. It is suprising that none of the reviews mention this since the book is very clear about its agenda. Buyer beware!

This is an excellent resource book on the ethnic hilltribe peoples on Laos. Incidentally, the war against the Hmong people still is going on today in Xieng Khoung province where the Laos government is using chemical and biological warfare against these people -- 300,000 have been killed by the government in the past two decades, at least 50,000 killed from biological warfare supplied by the Vietnamese. These people were asked to fight on behalf of America, and promised they would be taken care of if the war went badly. Unfortunately, the state department never had any intention of winning this war, just dragging out the war for the benefit of Dow Chemical and other multinationals profiting from the war. There are very few books about Laos, and almost none about the Hmong people. On top of this , many hilltribe people in Laos and Vietnam are being persecuted and killed for their conversions to Christianity.

The book is an exhaustive research completed by Asian Minorities Outreach covering numerous topics relative to the peoples of Laos.

Every people group is covered with topics such as: geographic location, population, religion, number of christians, prayer needs, & interesting stories of culture.

The book is a must-read for anyone who has the slightest interest in Laos or its peoples. It is, in my opinion, the authoritative resource on the unreached peoples of Laos.