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Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam - Paperback | Diverse Reads

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

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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.

ISBN-13: 9780316159197

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Little - Brown and Company

Publication Date: 07-17-2002

Pages: 512

Product Dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 1.50(d)

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