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

5.0

I found this book surprisingly emotional to read. Fall is an historian, and the book is full of detail on military maneuvers and political scheming. But what comes through paragraph by paragraph is the voice of a witness-- a man who was on the ground through all of the fighting and killing and dying, and is delicately attuned to the fundamental misunderstandings and failures of judgement that led to so much destruction. Written in 1961 and updated in 1964, the book was both a scholarly retrospective and an explicit warning to contemporary US decision-makers. Read 50 years later, it pains the reader to know that that warning was ignored, and that another round of blood-letting began soon after. And what's more, although this book and its author are quite well-known in military circles, recent conflicts around the world call into question whether we have been able to translate understanding into change.