A review by bobbo49
Street Without Joy: The French Debacle in Indochina by Bernard B. Fall

4.0

Although I have known of Bernard Fall's prescient books about the 1950s French war in Vietnam for many years, I hadn't gotten around to reading any of them until now. Street Without Joy is an inside look at how the French lost Vietnam, first published in 1961 and updated in 1964 with some very explicit warnings to the Americans about the nature of the war they were then entering. Would that Fall's book had been better disseminated and scrutinized by America's leadership in those years: his descriptions of political vs. military war, and the ineffectiveness of technological warfare against an indigenous and guerilla opponent, proved all too painfully accurate. History told as contemporary reportage; do we ever learn from the mistakes of others, let alone our own mistakes?