A Story of Viet Nam

Beginning of article

A story of Viet Nam

By TRU'O'NG BU'U LAM

Denver, CO: Outskirts Press, 2010. Pp. 372. Index.

A well-known peculiarity of the field of Vietnamese history is that there are very few English-language histories of the country which provide any kind of detailed treatment of the pre-colonial period, and the number of these written by scholars who know the Vietnamese language is even smaller. (In fact, the most comprehensive Western-language history of Vietnam before French colonisation remains Le Thanh Khoi's Histoire du Wet Nam: des origines a 1858 [Paris: Sudestasie, 1981]). Tru'o'ng Bu'u Lam, best-known for his collected translations of key source materials for Vietnamese history, has helped to fill this gap …