350
BOOK REVIEWS
However, such incomplete listings are probably common to many gazetteers.
In truth, the gazetteer was never intended to be comprehensive, and Mr. Ng and Dr. Baker cannot be faulted. Perhaps it is just as well to emphasize this. Instead, we should be thankful that the informative and often picturesque descriptive writing in the gazetteer comes over so well in translation, and for the liveliness of Dr. Baker's notes and his other writings (particularly the Ancestral Images series mentioned above). Through the far-sightedness of the Hong Kong University Press, the two authors have surely provided us with a most valuable and useful basis for intelligent appreciation of our past, as well as with many hints for further reading and further studies if we are so minded.
JAMES HAYES
Histoire de l'Asie du Sud-Est, Révoltes, Réformes, Révolutions, Pierre Brocheux (compiler), Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1981, 276 pp.
This collection of twelve essays, with a 9-page introduction by one of the contributors on behalf of himself and eight others, devotes itself largely to Vietnamese history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also includes material on early 20th century Laos and Cambodia, on Java and early Indonesian communism, and on present-day Singapore.
The Vietnamese subjects are widely distributed in time and place. They include a historical review of peasant movements; reform and traditionalism at the court of Hué in the later 19th century; Ta Thu Thau, an unsuccessful revolutionary assassinated by the Vietminh in 1945; a revolt (1918-22) among the Hmong "montagnards" living on the confines of China and Vietnam; the extreme left pan-Asiatic movement and the Vietnamese national movement 1905-25; and a survey of the communists' approach to the peasantry in Vietnam. There is also an essay on the agrarian reforms of the Diệm regime with American prompting and support.
In their introduction, the authors make the point that the
350
BOOK REVIEWS
However, such incomplete listings are probably common to many gazetteers.
In truth, the gazetteer was never intended to be comprehen- sive, and Mr. Ng and Dr. Baker cannot be either. Perhaps it is just as well to emphasize this. Instead, we should be thankful that the informative and often picturesque descriptive writing in the gazetteer comes over so well in translation, and for the liveliness of Dr. Baker's notes and his other writings (particularly the Ancestral Images series mentioned above). Through the far sightedness of the Hong Kong University Press, the two authors have surely provided us with a most valuable and useful basis for intelligent appreciation of our past, as well as with many hints for further reading and further studies if we are so minded.
JAMES HAYES
Histoire de l'Asie du Sud-Est, Révoltes, Reformes, Révolutions, Pierre Brocheux (compiler), Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1981, 276 PP.
This collection of twelve essays, with a 9 page introduction by one of the contributors on behalf of himself and eight others, devotes itself largely to Vietnamese history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also includes material on early 20th century Laos and Cambodia, on Java and early Indonesian communism, and on present day Singapore.
The Vietnamese subjects are widely distributed in time and place. They include a historical review of peasant movements; reform and traditionalism at the court of Hué in the later 19th century; Tha Thu Thau, an unsuccessful revolutionary assassinated by the Vietminh in 1945; a revolt (1918-22) among the Hmong "montagnards" living on the confines of China and Vietnam; the extreme left pan-asiatic movement and the Vietnamese national movement 1905-25; and a survey of the communists' approach to the peasantry in Vietnam. There is also an essay on the agrarian reforms of the Diêm regime with American prompting and support.
In their introduction, the authors make the point that the
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