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

by Frances FitzGerald

Overview

This landmark work, based on Frances FitzGerald's own research and travels, takes us inside Vietnam-into the traditional, ancestor-worshiping villages and the corrupt crowded cities, into the conflicts between Communists and anti-Communists, Catholics and Buddhists, generals and monks -and reveals the country as seen through Vietnamese eyes. With a clarity and authority unrivaled by any book before it or since, Fire in the Lake shows how America utterly and tragically misinterpreted the realities of Vietnam.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316074643
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	05/30/2009
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	512
Sales rank:	240,494
File size:	1 MB

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

	Preface	ix
I.	The Vietnamese
1.	States of Mind	3
2.	Nations and Empires	32
3.	The Sovereign of Discord	72
4.	The National Liberation Front	138
	Introduction	138
	Politics of the Earth	142
	The Origins of the National Liberation Front	145
	A Natural Opposition	150
	The Approach: Children of the People	157
	Rebellion: Self-Control Is the Root of Exploitation	165
	Organization: The Liberated Village, the NLF Command Structure, and the PRP	176
	The Making of a Revolutionary	197
	Marxism-Leninism in the Vietnamese Landscape	212
II.	The Americans and the Saigon Government
5.	Mise en scene	231
6.	Politicians and Generals	236
7.	The United States Enters the War	264
8.	The Buddhist Crisis	276
9.	Prospero, Caliban, and Ariel	292
10.	Bad Puppets	303
11.	Elections	323
12.	The Downward Spiral	339
13.	Prospero	360
14.	Guerrillas	379
15.	The Tet Offensive	388
III.	Conclusion
16.	Nixon's War	403
17.	Fire in the Lake	425
	Afterword	443
	Notes	454
	Bibliography	479
	Index	486

Editorial Reviews

Fitzgerald's Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning study of the Vietnam War remains essential reading 30 years after its initial publication. Fitzgerald's analysis differs from combat histories in that it presents the Vietnamese and Americans from a sociological point of view. This edition contains a new afterword in which Fitzgerald updates the story three decades after the American withdrawal. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

This is the richest kind of contemporary history; it places political and military events in cultural perspective....She is superb at clarifying the differences between Vietnamese and American cultures....This is the best book on Vietnam so far. -- The New York Times Books of the Century

Charles McGrath