Vietnam Crossing the street in Hanoi: Teaching and learning about Vietnam By CAROL WILDER Bristol: Intellect Books, 2013. Pp. 258. Figures, Afterword, References, Index. As Carol Wilder explains it, the act of crossing the street in Hanoi serves as a metaphor for 'moving forward hopefully and unscathed in many aspects of life in Vietnam' (p. 3). The engagement with Vietnam that led her to Hanoi and to her new book dates from her days as a university student and her opposition to United States' involvement in the conflicts that engulfed the country after the end of colonial rule in 1945. In the 1980s she began teaching a class entitled 'Vietnam: Rhetoric and realities' at San Francisco State University. She visited Vietnam for the first time in 1993, and has since returned multiple times, helping to develop a Media Studies class at Hanoi University and in 2007 spending a year in the country as a Fulbright Scholar. The book's lively prose and its generous use of illustrations reveal it as intended to be read as part of an undergraduate course or by the general audience of readers with an interest in Vietnam. Much of its content is based on lectures Wilder first wrote for her classes in the 1980s and '90s, supplemented by several new chapters emerging from her time in Vietnam, and all interspersed with personal experiences and anecdotes. Chapters juxtapose different representations of the conflict with more personal accounts intended to 'put a human face on what was an inhuman experience' (p. 23). Topics include the Hoa Lo prison, Ho Chi Minh, returned American veterans, and Graham Greene's novel, The Quiet American. The results are uneven. The chapter describing her students' projects on the Long Bien Bridge, for example, is one of the freshest and most engaging; by contrast, her analysis of the Rambo phenomenon, despite references to recent reinterpretations, feels dated. After all, even Sylvester has moved on and John Rambo's angst has mellowed into Barney Ross's resigned--and mercenary--expendability. This orientation towards the 1980s and '90s deprives Wilder not only of the opportunity to reflect on the evolving nature of American military interventions, but also of the opportunity to engage with more recent films such as Randall Wallace's We were soldiers (2002), a film of considerable relevance to the 'revisionist' school of right-leaning American scholarship on the conflict that the author criticises. Despite her description of the book as 'a work with no particular ideology' (p. 9), Wilder is clearly partial to what has been described as the 'orthodox' school of American scholarship on the conflict in Vietnam (for a thorough treatment of the two positions see Andrew Wiest and Michael Doidge, eds., Triumph revisited: Historians battle for the Vietnam War). Her sources on Vietnam are few, and generally limited to scholars prominent in the 1980s, and '90s such as Frances Fitzgerald, George Herring, Marilyn Young, and William Duiker (repeatedly misspelled as 'Druicker' in pp. 64, 65, 250). For Wilder, the 'American War in Vietnam was a catastrophic blind date set up by the French and fuelled by a toxic fear of communism and a near-psychotic avoidance of losing face' (p. 5). Ho Chi Minh was a 'mysterious hero of Vietnamese independence' who 'looked to the West and to the United States in particular in support of his country's freedom' (p. …