Unquiet Vietnam: New Dispatches from Across the Plane of Jars

From Michael Herr's classic bestseller Dispatches to epic films Platoon, Apocalypse Now and The Killing Fields, the Vietnamese War has been dissected in an avalanche of books, television series and films. But the state of modern Vietnam with its violent mixture of French Colonialism, American imperialism and ancient imperial traditions has escaped a detailed attention, until this book. Economist and Times journalist, Kenneth Murphy shares Vietnam's mixed background, having a French mother and a British father and being born in the United States. Growing up as a child during the war that defined the US, one of his close relatives was the last one to die during that war. In this poignant book, he visits Vietnam for the first time and investigates its tangled society, including an exclusive interview with the last descendant of the Vietnamese emperor, a French who used to be the owner of vast lands, and Ut his guide through Vietnam's baroque social scenery.