Shadows and Wind: A View of Modern Vietnam

In Shadows and Wind, Robert Templer paints a fascinating and fresh picture of a country usually viewed with hazy nostalgia or deep suspicion. Here is Hanoi, an increasingly tense and troubled city approaching its millennium but uncertain of its direction. Here are people emerging from a long wilderness of malnutrition, discovering a new lifestyle of leisure and luxury. And everywhere are the anomalies that burst the bubble of optimism: a vastly expensive luxury hotel sitting empty in an unknown town six hours from an international airport; museums crammed with fake exhibits. And there remains the one-party Communist state, still wrapped in secrecy and corruption, and making for an uneasy bedfellow with the rapacious capitalism it now encourages.Drawing on hundreds of interviews in Vietnam and years of research, Robert Templer has produced the first in-depth examination of the problems facing modern Vietnam. Shadows and Wind is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the Vietnam that now has emerged from a century of conflict with both foreign powers and with itself.

Author: Robert Templer
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 09/01/1999
Pages: 400
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.72lbs
Size: 7.96h x 5.62w x 0.89d
ISBN: 9780140285970

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 07/15/1999 pg. 1119
Publishers Weekly 08/16/1999 pg. 70
Library Journal 08/01/1999 pg. 120
Booklist 09/01/1999 pg. 66

About the Author
After graduating from Cambridge University Robert Templer worked in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Afghanistan. A regular contributor to the Guardian and Sunday Telegraph (London), he is a recipient of the prestigious Soros Fellowship and now teaches at the University of California at Berkeley.