DIVDIVDIVThe story of how one man wound up fighting the Vietnam War from a Chicago hospital/div Young slacker Jim Holder wants no part of the draft, the army, or Vietnam. So he registers as a conscientious objector and gets ready for alternative service. He’s assigned to work as a unit manager at a downtown Chicago medical center, worlds apart from his rural roots. A wild assortment of patients and colleagues awaits him at Metropolitan Hospital. As Jim’s life swings from the chaos of his job to the fervor of a revolutionary moment, he balances his beliefs with the everyday business of life and death.DIV In this richly comic novel, Paul Hoover crystallizes the strange days of the conflict in Vietnam with a memorable cast of characters./div/div/div

The Saigon Sisters offers the narratives of a group of privileged women who were immersed in a French lycée and later rebelled and fought for independence, starting with France's occupation of Vietnam and continuing through US involvement and life after war ends in 1975. Tracing the lives of nine women, The Saigon Sisters reveals these women's stories as they forsook safety and comfort to struggle for independence, and describes how they adapted to life in the jungle, whether facing bombing raids, malaria, deadly snakes, or other trials. How did they juggle double lives working for the resistance in Saigon? How could they endure having to rely on family members to raise their own children? Why, after being sent to study abroad by anxious parents, did several women choose to return to serve their country? How could they bear open-ended separation from their husbands? How did they cope with sending their children to villages to escape the bombings of Hanoi? In spite of the maelstrom of war, how did they forge careers? And how, in spite of dislocation and distrust following the end of the war in 1975, did these women find each other and rekindle their friendships? Patricia D. Norland answers these questions and more in this powerful and personal approach to history.

Twenty-three powerful, moving, angry and wise essays published over a period of 15 years on subjects ranging from South Africa to Central America, the United States to the Soviet Union, all bound together by the lingering physical, psychological, political and intellectual sensibilities the author first developed as a young enlisted Marine during the Vietnam war. Four of the essays deal with Ehrhart's second return to Vietnam in 1990.

This title re-maps public space in order to unveil contemporary spatial practices and to explore future possibilities. In the midst of historic migration and urbanisation, our limited public spaces are being contested and re-conceptualised in cities around the world with innovative experiments in some places and bloody battles in others. This book uses the case of sidewalks in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam where a vibrant everyday urbanism takes place in flexible patterns that defy conventional conceptions of public space.

An in-depth look at the diverging paths of Vietnamese American communities, or “Little Saigons,” in America’s built environment. In the final days before the fall of Saigon in 1975, 125,000 Vietnamese who were evacuated or who made their own way out of the country resettled in the United States. Finding themselves in unfamiliar places yet still connected in exile, these refugees began building their own communities as memorials to a lost homeland. Known both officially and unofficially as Little Saigons, these built landscapes offer space for everyday activities as well as the staging of cultural heritage and political events. Building Little Saigon examines nearly fifty years of city building by Vietnamese Americans—who number over 2.2 million today. Author Erica Allen-Kim highlights architecture and planning ideas adapted by the Vietnamese communities who, in turn, have influenced planning policies and mainstream practices. Allen-Kim traveled to ten Little Saigons in the United States to visit archives, buildings, and public art and to converse with developers, community planners, artists, business owners, and Vietnam veterans. By examining everyday buildings—who made them and what they mean for those who know them—Building Little Saigon shows us the complexities of migration unfolding across lifetimes and generations.

This book traces the history of African Americans who have served as foreign correspondents from the mid-1800s to the present.

Vietnamese refugees fleeing the fall of South Vietnam faced a paradox. The same guilt-ridden America that only reluctantly accepted them expected, and rewarded, expressions of gratitude for their rescue. Meanwhile, their status as refugees ”as opposed to willing immigrants ”profoundly influenced their cultural identity. Phuong Tran Nguyen examines the phenomenon of refugee nationalism among Vietnamese Americans in Southern California. Here, the residents of Little Saigon keep alive nostalgia for the old regime and, by extension, their claim to a lost statehood. Their refugee nationalism is less a refusal to assimilate than a mode of becoming, in essence, a distinct group of refugee Americans. Nguyen examines the factors that encouraged them to adopt this identity. His analysis also moves beyond the familiar rescue narrative to chart the intimate yet contentious relationship these Vietnamese Americans have with their adopted homeland. Nguyen sets their plight within the context of the Cold War, an era when Americans sought to atone for broken promises but also saw themselves as providing a sanctuary for people everywhere fleeing communism.