The Front thus offered both a traditional uniformity and loyalty to the state, and a modem revolution of individual self assertion.

was able to exploit traditional habits of discipline and cohesion, while training its members to rely not on their traditional elders but on each other. She shows how the National Liberation Front broke through the peasants’ passivity with a systematic encouragement of hatred, directing the villagers’ long repressed resentments against their landlords toward the bureaucrats appointed by the Diem regime. Miss FitzGerald shows in a brief historical survey how French colonialism began to disturb the old order, yet affected differently the three regions into which the French had divided Vietnam: Tonkin, Annam and Cochin China. Its fundamental units were the family and the village, tied to the land. It had been a stable society based on ritual, ancestor worship and profound sense of unanimity. “Fire in the Lake” is all these and much more: a compassionate and penetrating account of the collision of two societies that remain untranslatable to one another, an analysis of all those features of South Vietnamese culture that doomed the American effort from the start, and an incisive explanation of the reasons why that effort could only disrupt and break down South Vietnam's society-and pave the way for the revolution that the author sees as the only salvation. Miss FitzGerald, a young American freelance writer who has spent much time in Vietnam during the past six years, has written partly a history of South Vietnam, partly a study of American policy there, and partly an account of what this policy has done to a people we have destroyed in order to save from Communism. Fire in the lake is the image for revolution in the Chinese Book of Changes, the I Ching, and it's the title of this extraordinary book by Frances FitzGerald.

Fire in the lake by frances fitzgerald