Several years before we stepped into Vietnam with the idea of saving democracy, this book foreshadowed our venal weaknesses and hubris. A classic. ( )

This I read when trying to understand what Viet Nam in the 1960s would be like. ( )

A very loose collection of episodes detailing the interactions of various parts of the American expatriate community and the diplomatic service of the USA with the people and politics of a fictional south East Asian country, Sarkhan. When you are finished with reading it, you are open to understanding why the vietnamese war followed its course to the American defeat. The coutry that such an exploitive and manipulative alliance felt comfortable in creating, was easily prone to any socialist approach to getting rid of the American prescence ASAP. The book remains a telling critique of the American prescence in the world at large. For the rest of us it is a cautionary tale. ( )

A connected collection of vignettes, all centered around the fictional Southeast Asian country of Sarkhan and the Americans stationed there by the US government. I honestly didn't think I'd enjoy this one at all, because war and politics are very much not my reading jam, generally. But these stories are so well told, the characters so well drawn, and the point of the authors so well made that, in fact, I loved it. I never would have picked it up had the book not been on the list of banned books I've been working through for ages. It was banned for political reasons, and it's not difficult to see why: Lederer and Burdick wrote the thing to draw attention to the ridiculous attitudes Americans had toward the people in SE Asia, their self-isolation once stationed there (all-US cocktail parties and only shopping at the commissaries and such), and the buffoonery of the official decisions and (in)actions that resulted. Very readable and still relevant. ( )

This book caused quite a diplomatic stir when it was published in 1958 and accused the American diplomatic community as being a bunch of ignorant , venal idiots who care more about living a luxurious life with lots of servants while going to elegant dinner and cocktail parties than advancing American interests abroad.

The book is written as a series of vignettes rather than with a structured plot, and the writing is not very good. But the authors got their point across, and sadly sixty years later, nothing much has changed. ( )