✓ Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam || ¶ PDF Download by ↠ Frances FitzGerald

By Frances FitzGerald | Comments: ( 176 ) | Date: ( Dec 11, 2019 )

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 worFrances 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 subsequently 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.

  • Title: Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam
  • Author: Frances FitzGerald
  • ISBN: 9780316159197
  • Page: 219
  • Format: Paperback

About Author:

Frances FitzGerald

Frances FitzGerald is an American journalist and historian.

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

  • Michael Finocchiaro

    Outstanding analysis of the Vietnamese people and the American War from Frances FitzGerald written in 1972, so 3 years before the fall of Saigon. A triple crown winner (Bancroft Prize, National Book Award and Pulitzer), it is an impressive piece of scholarship and analysis. As stated in the title, the book is split into two parts: the first part is an attempt to explain the Vietnamese as a people before colonization, during the French Indochina period and during the two Indochina wars. The secon [...]

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  • Ronando

    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 tha [...]

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  • Kay

    Oh, how I wish this was not the first history I read of the Vietnam war. Having lived through the era, I had a naive hope that I would have some basic understanding of events and would be able to follow the author's arguments reasonably well. I was wrong. Another reviewer here likened reading Fire in the Lake to drinking from a fire hose, and I wholeheartedly agree. FitzGerald unleashes a torrent of statistics, quotes, and scholarship embedded in a rigorous sociological perspective and never let [...]

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  • Michael Brady

    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 pass [...]

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  • David Fox

    Nam’s Bad HabitI first became aware of Fire in the Lake shortly after it received the 1973 Pulitzer Prize. Knowing that it was the definitive political/social/cultural history of modern Viet Nam I purchased it immediately. I then proceeded to carry it around with me, packing & un-packing it for the next 20 years, without once cracking it open to even purview it. Disappointed with my resolve I sold it in a garage sale. Move forward another 15 years or so & I see it marked down in a book [...]

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  • John

    Wonderfully insightful and engagingly written book about the delusions that led US leaders to commit American ground and air forces to war in Vietnam.Triple Crown winner: Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award and Bancroft Prize. Not too many of them.

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  • James

    Written as the Vietnam War was ongoing, it takes the time to examine the Vietnamese and their national psyche without losing perspective. I assumed that it would reflect the immediate bias and make assumptions of reader knowledge, but the author avoided that.

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  • Ivan Vendrov

    Review:How did America lose the Vietnam War? How could the most powerful nation in world history fail to subdue a small, rural country that had already spent more than a century under colonial rule?Most of the answers I've heard to this question relate to the broader context of the Cold War. The support from the Soviet Union and China was decisive, or domestic dissent from the Communist-sympathizing left forced a premature American withdrawal.In contrast, Fitzgerald focuses almost exclusively on [...]

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  • Peter

    Francis FitzGerald’s Fire in the Lake (1972) is a classic analysis of Vietnam’s history and culture. Written as the Vietnam War was winding down, it received the Pulitzer Prize as well as other major awards. That I have not read it until now, forty-five years later, testifies to a dismally woeful education. But to read it now, when I have a (slightly) better grasp of the issues, is very satisfying. This is a book that should have been more heavily incorporated into the recent The Viet Nam Wa [...]

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  • Julian Friend

    Parts of this are extremely satisfying. Her understanding of the Buddhist resistance is lucid. 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 [...]

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  • Czarny Pies

    I added one star to my review of this book after reading several of the Good Read reviews below. It is my belief that this book will not age well because it was written at a time when all the relevant archival material would have still been classified. Eventually a better history will be written. However, this book opened the discussion with brilliance and thus has done us all a great service.The great virtue of "Fire in the Lake" which appeared while the Viet Nam war was still going in is that [...]

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  • Ben

    This book is superb. I hesitated for a moment to give it five stars because it's so dense that at times I had to motivate myself to keep plowing through, but how could an in-depth analysis of the cultural, political, economic, military and other aspects of the relationship between the U.S. and South Vietnam in the Vietnam War era not be heavy reading? I'd never heard of the book or of Fitzgerald before (not my fault, he says hopefully: I was born in 1983), but picked it up in advance of a 3-week [...]

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  • Billie Pritchett

    Frances FitzGerald's Fire in the Lake won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize and like a fool here I am giving it three stars. The reason is because it was tedious for me to read. There are a couple of different ways in which this book could have been organized, and it wasn't organized along either line.The book could have been organized in essays. Then, each chapter/essay would have an argument and be seeking to demonstrating something. This book didn't do that.The book could have be [...]

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  • Nate Brown

    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 poli [...]

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  • Tripp

    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 und [...]

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  • Kenneth

    This impressive, magisterial book on the Vietnam War seems like a suitable end, for now, to this particular reading phase of mine. It's quite a remarkable book and incredibly information-rich but you pay a price: it's very dense and not a straightforward read. It does strike me as entirely worthy of its Pulitzer.

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  • Kathleen

    3.5 stars. In her usual thoroughness, Frances Fitzgerald embraces the whole of Vietnam under French rule, the strength of Buddhism, and ancestor worship. The importance of this country to the United States, the high cost in dollars and in lives is aptly described. Having been a boy crazy teen, and a young college student I was too immature to pay attention to a war that was viewed each night at the dinner table. Even though this book was completed in 1972, the outcome seemed predictable. No one [...]

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  • Shelley

    3.5

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  • Elaine Gottlieb

    Great book but so long I don't have time to finish it.

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  • Steve Woods

    This is the most astute and insightful analysis of the Vietnam War I have read. Noone interested in the history or politics of the conflict can ever have a thorough of clear understanding of this, one of the most complex events of the 20th century without having read this book. The knots of confusion and the opacity of its unfolding all clear to crystal here. It is outstanding! The Americans trooped off to Vietnam equipped essentially with hubris, arrogance, irrational fear and racist bigotry. A [...]

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  • Monica

    From vietnamwar"Frances FitzGerald was not quite 32 years of age when her first book, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (1972), was published to immediate and extraordinary praise. Fire in the Lake was hailed for its "stunning clarity" by one reviewer and as "one of the best descriptions and analyses of Vietnam ever published in English" by another. TIME magazine was impressed that she had achieved "so fresh a blend of compassion and intelligence," and even the conser [...]

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  • Roxanne Russell

    This was slow, dense going for me because I'm so ignorant about the Vietnam "war". We never could get that close to contemporary in history class. Even though I majored in American History in undergrad, I never took a class on it or covered it in much depth. So this is the first non-fiction book I've ever read about it. (The Things They Carried- a short story collection by Tim O-Brien about soldiers in Vietnam is one of the best books I've ever read.)Fitzgerald taught me a lot with this book and [...]

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  • David Barie

    This landmark history details Vietnam from the cultural, historical and sociological perspective of the Vietnamese, beginning with its patriarchal, Confucian, collectivist beginnings in traditional villages, through its lack of any national identity through the French colonial period , continuing through the power vacuum left by the defeat of the Japanese in World War II that led to the establishment of North Vietnam, and the de facto creation of a corrupt South Vietnamese civilian and military [...]

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  • Anthony

    This forgotten classic is an example of "journalistic" history done right. Once upon a time American journalists were well versed in history and not sycophants to those in power (See American media during running up of Iraq War). Despite claims of bias from conservative critics, I found that Fitzgerald was actually were pretty objective in her analysis of American foreign policy in Vietnam. It's funny how conservatives (and conservative readers on this site) slam Fitzgerald for attacking America [...]

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  • Emillybeth

    This book had some interesting points but desperately needed an editor. So many typos and grammatically odd sentences, or sentences that start with prepositions. She frequently uses the exact same sentence format which becomes monotonous. While her thesis is interesting she has a habit of describing the Vietnamese peasant in a "noble savage" motif which is slightly Uncouth. Otherwise, it was refreshing to read a different perspective on the war, which opens up new questions for American interven [...]

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  • Witkinddavis

    A superbly written analysis of what went wrong for the United States in the Vietnam War. That is to say, everything. Fire in the Lake was published in 1971. I was an anti-war student at the time and have often wondered if I misunderstood something at the time about our government's policy. Maybe there was justification I was not aware of. Nope. Frances Fitzgerald documents our ignorance, stupidity and ultimately our brutality against a people we were supposed to be defending from bad guys.

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  • Esther

    A fascinating book. There were moments when I found some of it repetitive, but the points she makes bear repeating. I was disappointed that there's been no updating since the book was published in 1972; I imagine life in Vietnam is somewhat different now, and I wonder how, and how far back to or farther away the Vietnamese have come from where they were when they were forcibly divorced from their history.

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  • Dale

    The Vietnam War was the most significant event in that generation's lifetime. Thinking about it and looking back at it is like the inability of an individual not to stare at an accident. It also reflects a basic lack of understanding that cultures have developed as part of man's survival. Their individuality relates to different ways to cope with the environment. Not recognizing that uniqueness or difference does not reflect inferiority is key to us all being able to get along.

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  • Lanier

    139- There is so much we misconstrued about the people, culture and historical bounds before the main negative interactions with Vietnam. This book has not only taught me a great deal about a country I loved living in, but about my next destination, China. The more you learn about Vietnamese history, inevitably the more you gain insights into China.

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  • Linda

    An excellent study of Vietnamese history and traditional culture and the many ways the USA misunderstood and ignored them. An insightful analysis of what happened before and during American involvement in Vietnam, all the more compelling and impressive when you realize that FitzGerald wrote the work before we exited from Saigon and the country.

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  • ✓ Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam || ¶ PDF Download by ↠ Frances FitzGerald
    219 Frances FitzGerald
  • thumbnail Title: ✓ Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam || ¶ PDF Download by ↠ Frances FitzGerald
    Posted by:Frances FitzGerald
    Published :2019-09-21T12:28:58+00:00