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Viet Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present
Ben Kiernan
€ 71.54
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Description for Viet Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present
Hardback. This comprehensive work traces Viet Nam's history, a narrative of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious heritage, from ancient chiefdoms to imperial provinces, from independent kingdoms to contending regions, civil wars, French colonies, and modern republics. Num Pages: 656 pages, 59 halftones. BIC Classification: 1FMV; HBJF; HBL; HBLW3; HBWS2. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 235 x 156 x 46. .
This book narrates the history of the different peoples who have lived in the three major regions of Viet Nam over the past 3,000 years. It brings to life their relationships with these regions' landscapes, water resources, and climatic conditions, their changing cultures and religious traditions, and their interactions with their neighbors in China and Southeast Asia. Key themes include the dramatic impact of changing weather patterns from ancient to medieval and modern times, the central importance of riverine and maritime communications, ecological and economic transformations, and linguistic and literary changes. The country's long experience of regional diversity, multi-ethnic populations, and a multi-religious heritage that ranges from local spirit cults to the influences of Buddhism, Confucianism and Catholicism, makes for a vividly pluralistic narrative. The arcs of Vietnamese history include the rise and fall of different political formations, from chiefdoms to Chinese provinces, from independent kingdoms to divided regions, civil wars, French colonies, and modern republics. In the twentieth century anticolonial nationalism, the worldwide depression, Japanese occupation, a French attempt at reconquest, the traumatic American-Vietnamese war, and the 1975 communist victory all set the scene for the making of contemporary Viet Nam. Rapid economic growth in recent decades has transformed this one-party state into a global trading nation. Yet its rich history still casts a long shadow. Along with other members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Viet Nam is now involved in a tense territorial standoff in the South China Sea, as a rival of China and a < partner> of the United States. If its independence and future geographical unity seem assured, Viet Nam's regional security and prospects for democracy remain clouded.
Product Details
Publisher
Oxford University Press Inc
Format
Hardback
Publication date
2017
Condition
New
Number of Pages
656
Place of Publication
New York, United States
ISBN
9780195160765
SKU
V9780195160765
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
Ref
99-99
About Ben Kiernan
Ben Kiernan is the author of The Pol Pot Regime, Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia, and Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur.
Reviews for Viet Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present
Kiernan offers a comprehensive overview of Vietnamese history from prehistoric times to the 21st century ... A distinctive quality of this work is its inclusion of environmental and linguistic history. The author effectively explains how geography and changing weather patterns (droughts, etc.) impacted historical development and demonstrates how changes in language over time provides information about Vietnam's past ... Essential for all students of Vietnamese history. Extensive descriptions of Vietnam's relations with its neighbors also make this valuable reading for those interested in Chinese or Southeast Asian history.
Library Journal
This outstanding book shows that 'Viet Nam has always been much more than a war.' By making his themes the perennial continuities and changes in the vital ecologies and polyethnic cultures of the country, Ben Kiernan tells a story of shifting layers that is lucid and rich. His work is a kaleidoscope of Vietnamese history.
Greg Lockhart, author of Nation in Arms: the Origins of the People's Army of Vietnam
An audacious book, Kiernan's Viet Nam presents the country's long history to new, global audiences, eloquently showing how the deep past continues to shape and inform the present.
David Biggs, author of Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta
This is a remarkably evocative, multifaceted, sophisticated, and original study not only of those groups who haltingly coalesced as Vietnamese, but also of the many peoples with whom they interacted, and indeed of an entire region during two millennia. This book, I suspect, will become a classic in Asian as well as Southeast Asian historiography.
Victor Lieberman, University of Michigan
A major contribution to contemporary Southeast Asian scholarship... a sympathetic study of a tenacious and capable people.
Robin Gerster, Australian Book Review
Kiernan's dispassionate recording of the behaviour of the regional powers - Champa, Cambodia, China, India - should help to make Viet Nam: A History from Earliest Times a durable work
Sophie Quinn-Judge, Times Literary Supplement
Library Journal
This outstanding book shows that 'Viet Nam has always been much more than a war.' By making his themes the perennial continuities and changes in the vital ecologies and polyethnic cultures of the country, Ben Kiernan tells a story of shifting layers that is lucid and rich. His work is a kaleidoscope of Vietnamese history.
Greg Lockhart, author of Nation in Arms: the Origins of the People's Army of Vietnam
An audacious book, Kiernan's Viet Nam presents the country's long history to new, global audiences, eloquently showing how the deep past continues to shape and inform the present.
David Biggs, author of Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta
This is a remarkably evocative, multifaceted, sophisticated, and original study not only of those groups who haltingly coalesced as Vietnamese, but also of the many peoples with whom they interacted, and indeed of an entire region during two millennia. This book, I suspect, will become a classic in Asian as well as Southeast Asian historiography.
Victor Lieberman, University of Michigan
A major contribution to contemporary Southeast Asian scholarship... a sympathetic study of a tenacious and capable people.
Robin Gerster, Australian Book Review
Kiernan's dispassionate recording of the behaviour of the regional powers - Champa, Cambodia, China, India - should help to make Viet Nam: A History from Earliest Times a durable work
Sophie Quinn-Judge, Times Literary Supplement