"Street Without Joy"

Street Without Joy: The French Debacle in Indochina (Bernard Fall)

I'm not sure if "enjoyed" is the right word to use with this book, given the sheer human misery it covers, but "entertained" sounds even worse, so let's go with enjoyed. From what I understand, this is a definitive work on, well, the French debacle in Indochina, and it's not hard to see why - Fall's clear, crisp writing and interspersal of his own diary from Indochina masterfully combines both a macro and micro view of the conflict, and really the only bad thing I can say about it is that it's amazing and depressing that America's political and military leadership didn't seem to learn any of the lessons presented in this book before our own debacle. I did skip the chapter on Dien Bien Phu, having read a 600+ page book on it already (and Fall has his own book about it as well), but that's just about the only even slightly negative thing I can think to bring up.

Grade: A