Fire In The Lake: The Vietnamese And The Americans In Vietnam (2002) - Plot & Excerpts
Parts of this are extremely satisfying. Her understanding of the Buddhist resistance is lucid...from its early verve to its suicidal dissipation. Her use of the Prospero and Caliban analogy is very compelling. Parts get tediously mired in detail. Good on her for being thorough, but some of this stuff doesn't age so well. Vietnamese politics is not so interesting when dissected so, and she is at times redundant.She's remarkably impartial in describing American behavior, but less so when describing the Vietnamese-American relationship. Perhaps she strived too hard to appear impartial, and thus ends up being an advocate for the Vietnamese. Let's just call it what it is. In a minor example of this, she takes a doctor to task for calling the Vietnamese ungrateful. He had volunteered his services in a village and then, after helping several members of one family, asked if he could have a beer. He was told that he could buy one for the price that all Americans paid. This frustrated him. The author chides him for failing to see the contradiction in his own attitude (offering free help....which actually wasn't free: gratitude was expected), or his very presence as a sign of all the problems in Vietnam. However, the author fails to mention that the host was also projecting the macro problem onto a singular situation (this doctor = america). In this case, the objectification was happening from both sides, and the failing in both attitudes should be pointed out.
One day in the late 1970s, while attending the University of North Dakota, I was told by an older student who had spent his youth and his innocence as an American GI "busting his hump" across South Vietnam, that this was the best book ever written about America's involvement in Southeast Asia. Here I am, some 40 years later, much older than he was then, finally learning the truth of his sage advice. "Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam" is thoughtful, incisive, and passionate while maintaining a sense of detached credibility. Frances Fitzgerald wrote "Fire in the Lake" in a series of layers, each building upon those that precede and underlie it, Vietnamese, French, American. Her writing is dense with detail, yet skillfully fluid. I won't pretend its 590 pages flew by, but each one was as important for its content as it was enjoyable for its craft. Much of what I thought I knew about American involvement in Vietnam at the time, and in the decades since, was woefully incomplete until now. I regret waiting so long to read this fine history of one the most formative issues of my generation.
What do You think about Fire In The Lake: The Vietnamese And The Americans In Vietnam (2002)?
An outstanding book of history that remains relevant years after it was published. Fitzgerald skewers the American approach to war in Vietnam. She shows how poorly the country understood the war it was fighting. They misunderstood the role of the S Vietnamese government, the role of ARVN and the motivation to join the NLF. In a severe case of mirror imaging, they acted as if the Vietnamese were just itching to turn into Junior Americans. The subservient role is critical, as the the Americans undertook essentially colonialist attitudes.The relevance should be quite clear. This book could be turned slightly to be an indictment of US policy in Iraq and Afghanistan.
—Tripp
There is a lot of high quality, first hand information here obscured by a cloud of pretension and overly indirect language. She is not is a very friendly writer. I was also underwhelmed by her overly cultural interpretation of Vietnamese actions during the war. Often things that could easily be explained by mere rational self-interest were chalked up to the utterly foreign and un-Western way of thinking of the Vietnamese. On the other hand I appreciated her uncompromising condemnation of US policy later in the book. Other writers, even ones critical of the US, tend to portray the whole conflict as merely an unfortunate mistake rather than one of the major crimes of the 21st Century. (3 million Southeast Asians died, Agent Orange is still causing birth defects etc.)
—Nate263
This book is like drinking from a firehose!I am taking the entire year of 2007 to study Vietnam. "Fire in the Lake" is my 7th book and thank god I read the other ones first. There is so much information in this book that you will be blown away by just the shere volume of the history and politics surrounding Vietnam. Frances Fitzgerald does a thorough job of dissecting Vietnam and presenting it to the reader all the way down to the perspective of the captured NLF soldier, the peasant villager that was forced to evacuate their village, to the hubris American architects of the war.The only problem is that she tended to jump all over the place and it was rather dry. I don't suggest reading this book over any others. Better to read Stanley Karnow's Vietnam: A History!I have 6 more books on Vietnam to read for 2007 and I know that this book alone will be more of a historical lesson than all the others combined.
—Ronando
