Two Cities

In 1989, nearly 15 years after the end of the Vietnam War, the author returned to Vietnam. This book is an account of that trip. Visiting Hanoi for the first time, he talks to the soldiers and politicians who won the war and catalogues the fruits of victor: a continuing American trade embargo; crumbling hotels and govemment buildings, vestiges of the city's French colonial past; a ragged economy, and omnipresent shabbiness and squalor. In Saigon he is deluged with memories as he tracks down former acquaintances, ponders the transition from American-fed boomtown to vanquished backwater, and tries to piece together how people who fought for the South have fared under the rule of their former enemies. Filled with insight, emotion and brilliant reportage, this book is a shattering portrait of a country still reeling from the effects of American intervention.