Shadows and Wind: A View of Modern Vietnam (平装)
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品牌: Robert Templer
基本信息出版社:Penguin (Non-Classics) (1999年9月1日)平装:400页正文语种:英语ISBN:0140285970条形码:9780140285970产品尺寸及重量:20.8 x 13.2 x 2.3 cm ; 345 gASIN:0140285970
商品描述内容简介A powerful and vivid account of Vietnam, one of the most beautiful, ravaged, and misunderstood countries in the world
InShadows and Wind, Robert Templer paints a fascinating and fresh picture of a country usually viewed with hazy nostalgia or deep suspicion. Here is Hanoi, an increasingly tense and troubled city approaching its millennium but uncertain of its direction. Here are people emerging from a long wilderness of malnutrition, discovering a new lifestyle of leisure and luxury. And everywhere are the anomalies that burst the bubble of optimism: a vastly expensive luxury hotel sitting empty in an unknown town six hours from an international airport; museums crammed with fake exhibits. And there remains the one-party Communist state, still wrapped in secrecy and corruption, and making for an uneasy bedfellow with the rapacious capitalism it now encourages.
Drawing on hundreds of interviews in Vietnam and years of research, Robert Templer has produced the first in-depth examination of the problems facing modern Vietnam.Shadows and Windis essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the Vietnam that now has emerged from a century of conflict with both foreign powers and with itself.
"Groundbreaking. . . . In a convincing blend of colorful reportage and trenchant analysis, Robert Templer blows away the myths that have misinformed the world about this deeply troubled country."--Jeremy Grant,The Financial Times
"A meticulous and fascinating investigation.. . . For anyone interested in the real legacy of the Vietnam War, this book should be compulsory reading." --The Guardian专业书评From Publishers Weekly
"I am too young to have seen the Vietnam War on television or to have read about it at the time," British journalist Templer announces at the beginning of this penetrating and lyrical history, confessing that his own impressions of Vietnam had been formed by American books and movies. But upon arriving there in 1994 for a three-year stint as a reporter for Agence France-Presse, Templer found that more than half of the population had been born after American troops pulled out of Saigon, and that the reality of life in modern Vietnam was much more complex than he had realized. The lingering images of French colonial Indochine and the American experience in 'Nam oversimplify and obscure the struggles of a communist nation in the midst of economic reformADoi Moi, or "renovation"A after half a century of armed conflict. Not to mention the "Rip Van Winkle popular culture" that has awakened with an enormous appetite, but uneasy stomach, for Western stimulus. Dismissing as "drive-by reporting" such celebrated books on his topic as Frances FitzGerald's Fire in the Lake and William Prochnau's Once Upon a Distant War, Templer has built his own vision of Vietnam through hundreds of interviews and careful analysis of Vietnamese journalism and literature. A picture of a diverse culture emerges in a nation struggling to understand its relationship with China, adjust to feast rather than famine and balance its communist past with an increasingly capitalist present. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
It is easy still for Americans to think of Vietnam as a war and not a country. No longer at war with the U.S., France, or China, modern Vietnam seems at war with itself. The re-education camps of the 1970s, where the South Vietnamese learned mainly about hunger and hoarding scarce food, have given way to creeping capitalism, continued cultural repression, and a corrupt Communist state. Vietnam has been only marginally able to share in the wealth of its Asian neighbors. The Communist government's schizophrenic economic policies, combined with a generation gap between the ruling party and the younger Vietnamese, have resulted in a people with little confidence in the government to better their lives. Templer profiles the role of the government in economic and cultural policies that are keeping Vietnam a backward country. Most interestingly, though, he examines the role of the determined Vietnamese people as they make inroads through tiny gaps in public policies to grow food in rural areas, build a life in the cities, and try to maintain their culture and religion.Marlene Chamberlain