Ten Years After

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Photographer Page (Tim Page's Nam) here recounts in pictures a 1985 visit to Vietnam that ended at a 10th anniversary celebration of ``victory, unification and liberation'' in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon). The photo-graphs are striking, as, for example, a shot from the sky of farms that look like any in Iowaexcept for the scattered, rain-filled bomb cratersand another of a homeless man recently released from a reeducation camp sleeping in a doorway. Page also captures the silent wrecks of American aircraft at Ton San Nhut airport, the natural beauty of the Vietnamese shore and mountains, and the many faces of the Vietnamese themselvesat different times cheerful, exhausted, wizened or dutiful. As Shawcross notes, ``Page found that the stark rigidities of the new communist government are softened by the easygoing nature of most of the Vietnamese.'' (October)

Library Journal

Page, a photojournalist who received a severe head wound during the Vietnam conflict, gave us pictures of the war in Tim Page's Nam ( LJ 4/1/83). Now he returns to Vietnam to show us 103 photographs of the country as it is ten years after the end of the war. There are scenes of people at work, in contemplation, and even in celebration. Everywhere there are relics of the conflict in the form of unrestored devastation and the wreckage of the American war machine. Taken as a whole, however, the pictures are unremarkable and unsatisfying. Recommended only for the most comprehensive Vietnam collections. Kenneth W. Berger, Duke Univ. Lib., Durham, N.C.