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Very short List - FEBRUARY 3, 2012 |
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NONFICTION
A Pocket Guide to Vietnam, 1962 |
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A Pocket Guide to Vietnam, 1962 was published by the Department of Defense and meant for soldiers in the field.
Written in simple, declarative
sentences—“South Vietnam has a typically tropical climate of two seasons: hot
and dry and hot and rainy”—the book is deeply respectful of Vietnam’s culture
and people. (“Don’t think Americans know everything,” it instructs.) This
makes it a fascinating distillation of the
things we knew (or thought we knew) about a very old country we never did
come to understand—and fills it with all sorts of dramatic ironies.
Oxford’s Bodleian Library published a cheap and elegant reprint last year; it
carries a new foreword by U.S. Army veteran Bruns Grayson. (“I must have
received this handbook sometime in the spring of 1968, before heading off to
Vietnam that summer,” Grayson writes.) And the book’s also available as a
(free) PDF, which we’ve linked you to below.
 the
VeryShortList.com archive |
the book as a PDF
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