Leninism in Hanoi. - Review - book review

The style of the book, too, is very dry, almost bereft of humor or anecdote. The first half is a chronicle of seedy revolutionary activism-changes of name, squalid lodgings, factional bickering, and tiny-circulation radical journalism-that leaves the impression that being a revolutionary is much less fun than being a bus driver. Matters only really get off the ground after 1945, when the fantastic complexity of events in liberated Vietnam demands a reader's full attention. At this point the dramatis personae included at least five major nationalist and religious sects, three factions of Vietminh, and a powerful crime syndicate, not to mention five different sets of foreigners: the Japanese, the French, the O.S.S., the British (in the South), and the Chinese (in the North). Nobody would dare write a novel this involved.

In true Leninist style, Ho seems to have had very little personal life. He used women briefly, then wandered off to make more revolution. He wrote almost nothing but party tracts and some didactic verse. It is very difficult to get much feel for the man, and a relentlessly factual style like Duiker's does not help. Simply as a chronicle of Ho's career, however, I do not see how this book could be surpassed.

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