Hue-Tam Ho Tai (ed.), The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam (2001) (University of California Press, Berkeley). Jennifer Cole, Forget Colonialism? Sacrifice and the Art of Memory in Madagascar (200I) (University of California Press, Berkeley). The Country of Memory, edited by Hue-Tam Ho Tai, provides a remarkable and wide-ranging analysis of the forms and uses of collective and individual memory in twentieth-century Vietnam, even though the subtitle suggests a narrower focus on the last few decades. The book spans topics ranging from film to folk art, village shrines, official monuments, short stories, museums, tourist sites and memoirs. It is concerned both with the articulation and expression of official memory, and individual resistance to this same official memory, concluding with challenges to the dominant narrative of chien tranh than thanh, or sacred war. For most of this edited volume, the sacred war in question is the American War (more commonly known to Americans as the Vietnam War), although Peter Zinoman also deals with the French colonial era, and at least two of the contributions mention the Vietnamese war with Cambodia. In addition, Hue-Tam Ho Tai's chapter refers to earlier wars of liberation against the Chinese. Implicit in the book's tite, and hinted at by Shaun Kingsley Malarey when he refers to 'Vietnams's history of repelling foreign aggression', is the official narrative's central theme involving centuries of resistance against outside invasions, from the Mongols to the Chinese, French, Americans and Chinese once again. I might add that nowhere is this trope more clearly exposed than in Hanoi's National History museum, where a diorama depicts wave upon wave of outside invasion, by means of multi-coloured arrows, each one rebuffed by successive groundswells of popular resistance. The Country of Memory is very well conceived, featuring an internal coherence and a series of helpful cross-references, flagging topics yet to come. Indeed, such coherence is all too rare in edited volumes originating from a conference. The volume is divided into three parts, the first dealing with the construction of memory, the second with the repackaging of the past, and the third with gendered memories. Peter Zinoman's chapter on revolutionary memoirs opens the edited volume with a fascinating analysis of a formulaic genre. Indeed, Zinoman demonstrates that Vietnamese revolutionary prison memoirs assumed an almost serialized and uniform aspect, reflecting the state's influence in funding and sometimes even ghost-writing these texts. The many surprising characteristics of prison memoirs include some revealing omissions: the elision of common