The sharper edge to traveling in Asia

Archive for the 'Vietnam' Category

WoWasis book review: Jerry Hopkins’ ‘Romancing the East’

We’re old fashioned, those of us here at WoWasis. We like books that have left room to include a few blank pages at the end. Author Jerry Hopkins, one of the more prolific writers of the last few years, has written a compelling book that lacks those blank pages. It’s called Romancing the East: A […]

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WoWasis banned book review: ‘Saigon Gold’ by Hugh Scott

As a foreign writer, what do you have to do to get your novel banned in Vietnam? You mention things that ruffle the feathers of government censors, then refuse to re-write parts of your book. Hugh Scott, with his book Saigon Gold (2008, ISBN-13: 978-0979953484), which won the 2010 Gold Medal award for fiction from […]

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Top 4 Scuba Diving Spots in Vietnam

Today’s guest blog was written by WoWasis correspondent Jeremy Stein, who’s been running Rainbow Divers in Vietnam for 17 years. Vietnam is a great place to dive and to get certified, with clear, warm waters and lots to see. Here are his choices for the best 4 dive spots in Vietnam. For more details, contact […]

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WoWasis book review: ‘Don’t Mean Nothing,’ Vietnam nursing experience by Susan O’Neill

Like many other veteran of the Vietnam war experience, Susan O’Neill, who served as an army operating nurse in 1969-1970, was angry enough when she returned that she simply wanted to forget it. Years later, she wrote about her experiences in fictionalized short stories in her Don’t Mean Nothing: Short Stories of Vietnam. (2001, ISBN […]

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WoWasis Book review: ‘Tears of Autumn’ Vietnam spy fiction by Charles McCarry

Here at WoWasis, we love reading old books that we missed the first time around, especially when we discover something that we really shouldn’t have missed. We’ll bet you missed Charles McCarry’s thriller The Tears of Autumn (1974, ISBN 13-978-1-58567-890-7), too. That’s right, it was written in 1974, at which point many of the readers […]

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WoWasis book review: ‘Bangkok Dragons, Cape Cod Tears’ by Randall Peffer

From our catbird seat here at WoWasis, it’s pretty clear that novelist Randall Peffer, in his Bangkok Dragons, Cape Cod Tears (2009, ISBN 978-1-60648-038-0), knows a few disparate worlds. The transgender world features prominently here, both in Bangkok and Cape Cod, as does the Portuguese fishing community of the Cape. Melding these worlds with police […]

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WoWasis Vietnam book review: Nelson DeMille’s ‘Word of Honor’

If you’re a U.S. citizen, when you visit Vietnam, you may be pleasantly surprised at the lack of animosity. After all, the Yanks tore up the country and killed a lot of people. Just how badly things go haywire under combat conditions in Vietnam is a story that sets the table for Nelson DeMille’s epic […]

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WoWasis book review: ‘The Chinaman,’ Vietnam and IRA adventure by Stephen Leather

One of the goodest bad guys in the annals of fiction would have to be Nguyen Ngoc Minh, the protagonist of author Stephen Leather’s The Chinaman (1992, ISBN 978-0340-58025-7). And right, he’s not Chinese, but rather a former Vietnamese military man that ended up in England, running a Chinese food take-out business. Life was good […]

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WoWasis book review: ‘The Tunnel Rats,’ Vietnam terror by Stephen Leather

Vietnam’s Cu Chi tunnels were a particularly nasty element in the Vietnam war. Built by the Viet Cong, they went for miles underground, and there were nasty things living in there, aside from Viet Cong soldiers, including rats, massive spiders, and stinging mites that lived in the tree roots. Novelist Stephen Leather has managed to […]

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Thai crime scams: international crooks find a home in Thailand, authorities classify them by ethnicity and crime type

Thailand’s easy atmosphere has made it a home base for millions of tourists, but, according to Thai police, it’s also a haven for groups of international criminals. Amazingly, the police have mapped various ethnicities to certain types of crimes, according to an article appearing in the January 14, 2013 issue of the Bangkok Post. Here […]

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