| AN EYE FOR THE DRAGON: Southeast Asia Observed: 1954-1970 Dennis Bloodworth New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-374-15129-4 | ||||
| ISBN-10: 0-374-15129-6 | 414pp. | HC | $8.95 | |
Actually, just one solitary (and eminently forgivable) erratum, and four notable quotes:
| Page 47: | "In Vietnam in 1967 there were still isolated villagers who were unaware that President Ngo Dinh Dien had been butchered four years before, and who knew nothing of their latest rulers." |
| S/B "Ngo Dinh Diem". (Elsewhere in the book it is spelled correctly.) |
| Page 198: | Our destination was a love village, a hamlet of thatched wooden houses on stilts which could be hired by the night and were staffed by servants ready to provide drinks and light refreshments discreetly, but were otherwise uninhabited. We wer served raw turtle eggs, and I was then invited to hear the musicians in a room at the back. "But I'd rather have a bit of talk about the recrudescence of guerilla activity," I argued despairingly. "Later, later," they said. "First, the three musicians." I love the liquid soft notes of Cambodian music and allowed myself to be pushed gently into a small, moonlit chamber. I emerged some considerable time later, and borrowed a comb. I had learned what the Vietnamese meant by "the three musicians," but we never did get around to talking about the recrudescence of guerilla activity. |
| Page 216: | Years of discretion have left on Dr. Dan a mask that is almost batrachian in its cool immobility, . . . |
Batrachian — another one o' them new words... It means "pertaining to frogs and toads".
| Page 258: | Phoumi captured Vientiane, and Souvanna Phouma was compelled to make common cause with the Communists to the north. "The Americans have made me utterly dependent on the Russians now," he told me, moodily chewing on a cheroot, when I met him subsequently at the rebel headquarters which he shared with the Pathet Lao on the Plain of Jars. The dismal farce was not to lose pace, however. Having suspended aid to Souvanna Phouma because he tried to unite the country by coming to terms with the Pathet Lao, the Americans now began to have second thoughts, and Washington was soon suspending aid to General Phoumi in turn—in his case because he failed to try to unite the country by coming to terms with the estranged Souvanna Phouma. But of course it is misleading to write "Washington." "The trouble with us," an elderly Laotian statesman said to me with a shrug during those stirring days, "is that we have three governments and all of them American-the State Department, the Pentagon, and the C.I.A." |
| Page 280: | Nations do not run amok, but the new countries of Southeast Asia—jealous of their often slender repute and conscious of condescension in others—will sometimes fling themselves into a seemingly senseless fury which bewilders the calculating West and introduces an X-factor into Far Eastern affairs that confounds all the computers. Irrational emptionalism, that ugly yet endearing quality which justifies the self-explanatory epitaph "he was only human," did not die in Indonesia with the eclipse of Sukarno. |
There's a span of time between my review and the creation of this page, for which the quotes were saved in a text file; so I cannot recall what "emptionalism" means. It's probably a typo on my part — perhaps it should be "exemptionalism".
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