Andrew Bacevich writes:

The ‘war for peace’ that Lien-Hang Nguyen describes begins late in the summer of 1945 and concludes in January 1973. Nguyen is a refugee from Vietnam – her family fled when she was an infant – who teaches history at the University of Kentucky. She briskly recounts French efforts to restore colonial rule over all of Indochina at the end of the Second World War, and the fierce resistance they met. By 1954, France was ready to concede failure. Yet for the Vietnamese, the French defeat yielded only a partial victory: the Geneva Accords resulted in the division of Vietnam and set the stage for the second phase of the struggle.

(LRB 7 February 2013)

The University of North Carolina Press | Hardback 336 pp. |ISBN: 9780807835517