Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

by Frances FitzGerald
Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

by Frances FitzGerald

Paperback(Reprint)

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Overview


Frances FitzGerald's landmark history of Vietnam and the Vietnam War, "a compassionate and penetrating account of the collision of two societies that remain untranslatable to one another." (New York Times Book Review)

This magisterial work, based on Frances FitzGerald's many years of research and travels, takes us inside the history of Vietnam -- the traditional, ancestor-worshiping villages, the conflicts between Communists and anti-Communists, Catholics and Buddhists, generals and monks, the disruption created by French colonialism, and America's ill-fated intervention -- and reveals the country as seen through Vietnamese eyes. 

Originally published in 1972, Fire in the Lake was the first history of Vietnam written by an American and won the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the National Book Award. With a clarity and insight unrivaled by any author before it or since, Frances FitzGerald illustrates how America utterly and tragically misinterpreted the realities of Vietnam.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780316159197
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Publication date: 07/17/2002
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 512
Sales rank: 361,095
Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Frances FitzGerald is the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Bancroft Prize, and a prize from the National Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the author of The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America; Fire in the Lake: the Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam; America Revised: History School Books in the Twentieth Century; Cities on a Hill: A Journey through Contemporary American Cultures; Way Out in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War; and Vietnam: Spirits of the Earth. She has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, Rolling Stone, and Esquire.

Table of Contents

Prefaceix
I.The Vietnamese
1.States of Mind3
2.Nations and Empires32
3.The Sovereign of Discord72
4.The National Liberation Front138
Introduction138
Politics of the Earth142
The Origins of the National Liberation Front145
A Natural Opposition150
The Approach: Children of the People157
Rebellion: Self-Control Is the Root of Exploitation165
Organization: The Liberated Village, the NLF Command Structure, and the PRP176
The Making of a Revolutionary197
Marxism-Leninism in the Vietnamese Landscape212
II.The Americans and the Saigon Government
5.Mise en scene231
6.Politicians and Generals236
7.The United States Enters the War264
8.The Buddhist Crisis276
9.Prospero, Caliban, and Ariel292
10.Bad Puppets303
11.Elections323
12.The Downward Spiral339
13.Prospero360
14.Guerrillas379
15.The Tet Offensive388
III.Conclusion
16.Nixon's War403
17.Fire in the Lake425
Afterword443
Notes454
Bibliography479
Index486
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