Vietnam - by Christopher Goscha (Paperback)

About the Book

"Vietnam's role in one of the Cold War's longest-running conflicts has meant that its past has been endlessly abused. Popular accounts have cherry-picked from the Vietnamese past to tell politicized, American-centered stories--either reducing the story of Vietnam and the Vietnamese to a noble tradition of anticolonial resistance embodied by the communist leader Ho Chi Minh, or alternatively seeking to rehabilitate American allies by making similarly essentialist claims about "the Vietnamese" and their history. Now, over forty years after the end of the American war in Vietnam, the events which created the modern state of Vietnam can be seen in truly historical perspective. Christopher Goscha's Vietnam: A New History tells the story of this fascinating and complex country on its own terms, emphasizing the contingency that characterizes Vietnam's history and the diversity of its people, polities, geography, and experiences as both colonized and colonizers"--

Book Synopsis

"The best one-volume history of modern Vietnam in English" (Wall Street Journal)

In Vietnam, Christopher Goscha tells the full history of Vietnam, from antiquity to the present day. Generations of emperors, rebels, priests, and colonizers left complicated legacies in this remarkable country. Periods of Chinese, French, and Japanese rule reshaped and modernized Vietnam, but so too did the colonial enterprises of the Vietnamese themselves as they extended their influence southward from the Red River Delta. Over the centuries, numerous kingdoms, dynasties, and states have ruled over -- and fought for -- what is now Vietnam. The bloody Cold War-era conflict between Ho Chi Minh's communist-backed Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the American-backed Republic of Vietnam was only the most recent instance when war divided and transformed Vietnam.

A major achievement, Vietnam offers the grand narrative of the country's complex past and the creation of the modern state of Vietnam. It is the definitive single-volume history for anyone seeking to understand Vietnam today.

Review Quotes

"[An] excellent book.... Goscha is rigorously objective; but he does not shy away from analysis amid his historical fact finding."--The VVA Veteran

"[A] thorough and thoughtful new history."--The Economist

"A splendid achievement. Christopher Goscha is one of our leading historians of modern Vietnam, and he shows it in this nuanced, fair-minded, deeply humane book. Destined to be a standard work on the subject."--Fredrik Logevall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

"A vigorous, eye-opening account of a country of great importance to the world, past and future."--Kirkus Reviews

"A welcome new scholarly take on the story of a fascinating country." --Washington Independent Review of Books

"For those who have wanted a distinct and comprehensive overview of Vietnam's history, this is it. Christopher Goscha has an eye for how history connects through generations and how a country can rise from disasters in a new form, without losing sight of its past."--Odd Arne Westad, author of Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750

"Groundbreaking... Goscha has provided quite simply the finest, most readable single-volume history of Vietnam in English."--Guardian

"Mr. Goscha is one of the most talented and prolific of a new group of American and French historians who have examined the modern history of Vietnam not in regard to the country's relationship to the U.S. or the Cold War but on its own terms... [he] has put together what will probably be for some time the best one-volume history of modern Vietnam in English... for readers seeking a concise, insightful and readable guide to the complexity and variety of Vietnam's modern history, this book is an excellent choice."--Wall Street Journal

"Powerful and compelling. Vietnam will be of growing importance in the twenty-first-century world, particularly as China and the US rethink their roles in Asia. Christopher Goscha's book is a brilliant account of that country's history. Paying careful attention to Vietnamese voices as well as those of colonizers, he constructs a narrative that sets Vietnam in context, and makes it for western readers so much more than a half-remembered event in the Cold War."--Rana Mitter, author of Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945

About the Author

Christopher Goscha is professor of history at the Université du Québec à Montréal. The author and editor of numerous books on Southeast Asia and international relations in English and French, he lives in Montreal, Canada.