A study guide for Nguyen Thi Vinh's "Thoughts of Hanoi", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students series. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
A Study Guide for Kathyrn Stockett's "The Help," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
Winner of the PEN/Jerard Award Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year Kiriyama Notable Book "[A] perfectly pitched and prodigiously detailed memoir." - Boston Globe As a Vietnamese girl coming of age in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Nguyen is filled with a rapacious hunger for American identity, and in the pre-PC-era Midwest (where the Jennifers and Tiffanys reign supreme), the desire to belong transmutes into a passion for American food. More exotic- seeming than her Buddhist grandmother's traditional specialties, the campy, preservative-filled "delicacies" of mainstream America capture her imagination. In Stealing Buddha's Dinner, the glossy branded allure of Pringles, Kit Kats, and Toll House Cookies becomes an ingenious metaphor for Nguyen's struggle to become a "real" American, a distinction that brings with it the dream of the perfect school lunch, burgers and Jell- O for dinner, and a visit from the Kool-Aid man. Vivid and viscerally powerful, this remarkable memoir about growing up in the 1980s introduces an original new literary voice and an entirely new spin on the classic assimilation story.
The highly acclaimed novel that reveals the life of a Vietnamese family in America through the knowing eyes of a child finding her place and voice in a new country. “A brilliant evocation of human sorrow and desire.... Heartbreaking and exhilarating.” —The New York Times Book Review In 1978 six refugees—a girl, her father, and four “uncles”—are pulled from the sea to begin a new life in San Diego. In the child’s imagination, the world is transmuted into an unearthly realm: she sees everything intensely, hears the distress calls of inanimate objects, and waits for her mother to join her. But life loses none of its strangeness when the family is reunited. As the girl grows, her matter-of-fact innocence eddies increasingly around opaque and ghostly traumas: the cataclysm that engulfed her homeland, the memory of a brother who drowned and, most inescapable, her father’s hopeless rage.
Since the Doi Moi policy of economic renovation was introduced in 1986, Vietnam has undergone deep transformations as a result of the transition to a socialist-oriented market economy. Social and urban transition has taken place in parallel, as urban dynamics were spurred on by Vietnamese public and private stakeholders, and by external agents such as international organizations and international solidarity organizations, experts, consultants and bilateral aid organizations.Here are the results of research carried out by French, Canadian and Vietnamese teams from the north and south of the country on the overarching theme of Vietnamese cities in transition. Some of this research deals with urban dynamics, some with the issues at stake within such dynamics, or with the strategies of the most significant stakeholders in urban transition: civil society, donors within the framework of official aid for development, consultants and international consultancy firms. These projects were carried out between 2001 and 2004 as part of the Urban Research Programme for Development (PRUD), and mainly focus on Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, or both in the case of comparative studies.Is there such a thing as a Vietnamese model of an Asian city? It seems that urban transition in Vietnam is not taking place in as radical and abrupt a manner as in China. The country's capacity for absorbing external models, the quest for a third way between state intervention and economic liberalism, and the fact that the country's architectural heritage is taken into account in urban planning, are just some of the reasons for its particularity. The issues addressed in each chapter, as well as the proposals for further research suggested by the contributors, should act as a catalyst for urban research in Vietnam.
The classic story of one family torn apart by the Revolutionary War All his life, Tim Meeker has looked up to his brother. Sam is smart and brave, and is now a part of the American Revolution. Not everyone in town wants to be a part of the rebellion. Most are supporters of the British, including Tim and Sam’s father. With the war soon raging, Tim knows he will have to make a choice between the Revolutionaries and the Redcoats, and between his brother and his father.
Of the many facets of the American war in Southeast Asia debated by U.S. authorities in Washington, by the military services and the public, none has proved more controversial than the air war against North Vietnam. The air war s inauguration with the nickname Rolling Thunder followed an eleven-year American effort to induce communist North Vietnam to sign a peace treaty without openly attacking its territory. Thus, Rolling Thunder was a new military program in what had been a relatively low-key attempt by the United States to win the war within South Vietnam against insurgent communist Viet Cong forces, aided and abetted by the north. The present volume covers the first phase of the Rolling Thunder campaign from March 1965 to late 1966. It begins with a description of the planning and execution of two initial limited air strikes, nicknamed Flaming Dart I and II. The Flaming Dart strikes were carried out against North Vietnam in February 1965 as the precursors to a regular, albeit limited, Rolling Thunder air program launched the following month. Before proceeding with an account of Rolling Thunder, its roots are traced in the events that compelled the United States to adopt an anti-communist containment policy in Southeast Asia after the defeat of French forces by the communist Vietnamese in May 1954.
Built on 'the bend in the Red River', Hà Nội is among Southeast Asia's most ancient capitals. Over the centuries, it took shape in part from a dense substratum of villages. With the economic liberalisation of the 1980s, it encountered several obstacles to its expansion: absence of a real land market, high population densities, the government's food self-suffciency policy that limits expropriations of land and the water management constraints of this very vulnerable delta. Since the beginning of the new millennium, the change in speed brought about by the state and by property developers in the construction and urban planning of the province-capital poses the problem of integration of in situ urbanised villages, the importance of preserving a green belt around Hà Nội and the necessity of protection from flooding. The harmonious fusion of city and countryside, which has always constituted the Red River Delta's defining feature, appears to be in jeopardy. Working from a rich body of maps and field studies, this collective work reveals how this grass-roots urbanisation encounters 'top-down' urbanisation, or metropolisation. By combining a variety of disciplinary approaches on several different scales, through a study of spatial issues and social dynamics, this atlas not only enables the reader to gauge the impact of major projects on the lives of villages integrated into the city's fabric but also to re-establish the peri-urban village stratum as a fully-fledged actor in the diversity of this emerging metropolis.
This is the first of a series of chronological histories prepared by the Marine Corps History and Museums Division to cover the entire span of Marine Corps involvement in the Vietnam conflict. This particular volume covers a relatively obscure chapter in U.S. Marine Corps history—the activities of Marines in Vietnam between 1954 and 1964. The narrative traces the evolution of those activities from a one-man advisory operation at the conclusion of the French-Indochina War in 1954 to the advisory and combat support activities of some 700 Marines at the end of 1964. As the introductory volume for the series this account has an important secondary objective: to establish a geographical, political, and military foundation upon which the subsequent histories can be developed.
