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justaprilann's review
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
3.5
I appreciated this personal account of experiencing the Vietnam War from so many angles: insider, outsider, living in peace abroad with family and friends back in Vietnam. It also showed complicated the politics were and that maybe it’s not so easy to pick the “good guys.”
alerasaul0's review
informative
reflective
medium-paced
3.0
I thought this would be a more personal account of his life and the impact growing up as french/Vietnamese child in the war years had on him from the distance of London. There was some of that but that vast majority of it was an brief illustrated history of the war. Is it bad? No. But I was disappointed.
andystone's review
5.0
A perfect Sequel to Such A Lovely Little War, and the best historical account I’ve ever read about the Vietnam war. The translation from French mostly works but has a few clunky bits of dialogue. With how accessible the book is, I can highly recommend it to just about anyone.
chelseamartinez's review
3.0
This book tells a more complicated story than the volume that precedes it: the family has moved to Europe and the author and his siblings are growing up in the middle of 1960's protest movements with an absentee father and depressed mother. It was interesting to see how the family did and did not "fit in" in different neighborhoods in England and the way education afforded them an outlet from living in a home plagued by sadness and anger as expatriates of Vietnam. The book also helped me understand a bit about modern-day baby boomer fear of "socialism" which in some cases I guess might connect to something real (I usually scoff at): mostly ignorant leftist support for communist regimes in Asia, which the author is able to depict even-handedly alongside critiques of the US involvement in regime change there.