A sober, no-frills reportorial look at the present-day political and social climate in Vietnam, by a New York Times correspondent who has specialized in Asia for decades. Although Kamm covered the war in Vietnam, this is not an anecdote-strewn ``going back'' memoir. ``This is a book about Vietnam today,'' Kamm says in his preface, and ``its subject is Vietnam, not the American intrusion upon the life of Vietnam or the pain that America inflicted upon itself by its willful interference.'' Kamm, a 1978 Pulitzer Prize winner for his reporting on Vietnam's ``boat people,'' only partially lives up to this promise. While indeed focusing on present-day Vietnam, he recounts the highlights of the American war, including two chapters that deal with the legacies of shameful American wartime ``intrusions'': the My Lai massacre of 1968 and the 1972 ``Christmas bombing'' of Hanoi's Bach Mai Hospital. The most valuable sections, however, are those in which Kamm sticks to his stated aim; the most informative are the ones on the cultural and social differences between northern and southern Vietnamese and on the post-1975 political excesses of the victorious Vietnamese communists. Kamm's reporting of events in present-day Vietnam affirms what other observers have said: Russians are despised, Americans welcomed. Life is harsh for tens of millions of Vietnamese mired in abject poverty, especially rural areas. Prostitution is a serious, growing national problem. Saigon is a booming commercial center; Hanoi is only slowly emerging from its Stalinist past. And while the Vietnamese government has liberalized its economy, it remains harshly totalitarian. Kamm has few good words for the country's hard-line leaders, ``narrow-minded, stiff- necked old Communists'' who allow ``no challenge to their absolute power.'' Kamm plainly shows that Vietnam is a country, not a war. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-55970-306-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1995
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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