100 books like Development in Vietnam

For readers interested in a sectoral analysis of Vietnam’s reforms and economic growth, the book provides a useful account of one major area of reform in Vietnam, namely education.

Coupled with domestic training and foreign capital inflows, this education sector and its reforms can be said to be a principal contributor to the country’s development and growth. The book also discusses the reform’s rationale and issues and, for policy analysis, describes the consequences for the sector and the economy in recent years.

This is a useful book to understand the basic problems and achievements of a socialist country’s move towards a globalized and free market system.

This book is a version of the authors’ previous work published by the South East Asia Institute. As a contribution to the specific theme, it first provides a description of Vietnam’s reforms and development. It also discusses a number of special features of this policy, including outcomes, pro and con analysis, and obstacles. 

For readers interested in sectoral analysis and especially labour studies, the book discusses the transformation of employment relations in Vietnam since Doi Moi in 1987. These relations have been a key part of Vietnam’s reforms and a necessary pre-condition to the country’s long-awaited WTO membership in 2007.

The book first examines the nature of employment reforms, analyses the motivation behind new policy initiatives, and then examines the detail of reforms in a range of business enterprises. The book’s sources of information are based on extensive original research.

To me, the book represents a pioneering landmark work on Vietnam’s epoch-making macroeconomic policy.

It is a very early study by an internationally distinguished economist and ministerial official on Vietnam’s reforms and development. The book covers the major and important problems and issues that existed in the beginning of the Doi Moi opening up policy in 1987. Significantly, these problems and issues still persist today in policy analysis and contemporary scholarly studies.

The study of battles, and often individual actions by small groups of men, has been an important part of Australian military history, and the Australian military historical tradition has produced many fine practitioners of operational military history. One author who produced a fine example of the genre is Gerard Windsor, the author of fiction and memoir who, though without any previous experience of writing military history, produced All Day Long the Noise of Battle, a study of the attack made by one company of Australian infantry upon a Viet Cong bunker system in Phuoc Tuy province, South Vietnam, in 1968. Sparked by a chance encounter with a schoolmate, Windsor began investigating a hitherto unnamed battle, one of the most fierce the Australians fought in their ten-year war in Vietnam, and a superb example of how to write about men in battle. 

Dr. Gus Kappler contacted me via my Facebook page. After we spoke, I ordered his book, Welcome Home From Vietnam, Finally: A Vietnam Trauma Surgeon’s Memoir. Since I write Vietnam War fiction, I found his memoir both enlightening as to how it really was for the doctors saving the lives of our troops. M*A*S*H it is not, while themes in that classic show have a ring of truth. I will not mention them as you need to read the book to understand. The book is written from Gus’ heart and soul of his experiences and illustrated with the pictures he took in-country. The book is gritty, down-to-earth, and above all, how it truly was to work in a Vietnam War field hospital—the 85th Evacuation Hospital. You need to read this book.

As a female journalist who has lived and worked abroad, including in sometimes unsafe situations but excluding war, I was drawn to Miller’s story about covering the Vietnam War. In 1970 young American women were not supposed to go to Vietnam. They were supposed to get married, and Miller did—to a member of the military whose job proves her ticket to Vietnam.

As one of the rare female reporters in Vietnam, Miller captured stories her male colleagues couldn’t or wouldn’t cover such as how young Vietnamese girls were often tricked into the sex trade. An outsider in the “old boys club” of news and war Miller is able to understand better than her male colleagues how the war is impacting the locals who have in some ways been made outsiders in their own country.

Titled after the cost of a single sniper round, this book details the performance and accomplishment of scout snipers in the 5th Marine Regiment. Culberson and his fellow Marine snipers exhibited patience, stealth, marksmanship, and pure courage to make their sniper platoon the most decorated in the Corps. Uncommon valor was a common virtue among these one-shot killers.

By jetting a privileged California tween of Vietnamese descent into her extended family in Hanoi, Thanhhà Lai creates all kinds of expectations and then delightfully subverts them, educating and entertaining readers at the same time.

Although most of the book is about Mai’s culture shock and gradual adjustment, her frail grandmother Bà remains the emotional center of the story. Bà’s loss of her husband during the Vietnam War and her journey to reclaim his secret last message build the story into a dramatic climax unlike any I’ve ever encountered.

This riveting memoir will take you into the world of a young non-communist nationalist, Nguyen Cong Luan, whose father joined Ho Chi Minh in 1945 to fight the French colonialists despite distrusting Ho’s communist core.

Luan’s father dies in a communist prison shortly thereafter, leaving his son to grow up largely on his own in dangerous areas contested by the French, the communists, and the non-communists. What makes Luan’s account so eye-opening is that he shows that the communists led by Ho Chi Minh were not the only nationalists to fight during some thirty years of war. The non-communists did, too, as his own journey into adulthood and the army of South Vietnam reveals.

At a deeper level, Nguyen Cong Luan reminds us that though the struggle for Vietnam was a French and American one, at its core, it was a civil war among the Vietnamese.