Laos Books

The Libertarian Reader: Classic and Contemporary Writings from Lao Tzu to Milton Friedman

David Boaz

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A Valuable Addition to Any Political Science Library 5 out of 5 stars.
16 of 17 people found this review helpful.

If you are looking for a quick introduction to the principles and practices of the Libertarian Party, avoid this book; a good search engine and some basic research skills are all you need. If instead you're searching for a deeper understanding of the philosophy of liberty, then I can suggest no better starting point.

The book itself is a collection of short essays from a wide range of contributors to the libertarian tradition, from political economists and philosophers (such as Locke, Mill, and Adam Smith) to some perhaps more surprising sources (like the Old Testament and the Tao Teh Ching). These essays are grouped around broad themes - "individual rights", "free markets", "skepticism about power" - certainly a boon to students, but also an aid to the casual reader. Should a particular topic or thinker pique your interest, a lengthy essay called "The Literature of Liberty" catalogs the sources as it closes the book.

Whether reading this book will convince you to join the Libertarian Party, or send money to the Cato Institute, is a matter open to debate; indeed, some critics rightly point out elements of "big L" Libertarianism that are at odds with "small l" classical liberal thought. My own hope is that reading these essays will give you not only a better understanding of the founder's intent, but also a clearer vision of a better possible future - a freer, saner world. How we get there, if we get there, remains to be seen.

Editorial Review:

Conceived as the companion volume to David Boaz's Libertarianism, this anthology comprising the likes of Lao-tzu and Milton Friedman is a treasure trove. That's because libertarianism touches on such important issues as the nature and extent of individual rights, the proper powers of government, and the virtues and shortcomings of the marketplace, and besides, it has tempted many of history's best minds. Pound for pound, the most impressive piece of reasoning here is philosopher Robert Nozick's attempt to defend a "minimal state, limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, [and] fraud, [and] enforcement of contracts" and the view "that any more extensive state will violate persons' rights not to be forced to do certain things." Still, I wonder if Nozick has always turned down federal research grants and has always refused to pay income taxes, and if he hasn't, why not?

Lao-tzu's Taoteching: with Selected Commentaries of the Past 2000 Years

Lao-tzu

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Finally! A Tao Te Ching with the appropriate commentaries 5 out of 5 stars.
16 of 16 people found this review helpful.

In Asia, sacred texts like the Tao Te Ching are read with reference to the commentaries of its key historical luminaries. Only in the west is it read by itself, with no guidance. Finally, we have a TTC with key commentaries. Plus, the author has here given a translation that may come as close as possible to expressing the Chinese in English. It is concise, even pithy.
A number of other features make this volume unique and particularly valuable. Pine's extensive introduction covers an intriguing linguistic insight into the Chinese written character for Tao, Lao Tzu's historical background, the usual issues of authorship, etc., and some of the deeper understandings of the important themes of philosophical Taoism. Also, he has provided black and white photos of the famed Hanku Pass and the Loukuantai where tradition holds that Lao-tzu wrote the Tao Te Ching. The Chinese text is provided along side Pine's clear and unadorned translation. He utilizes the earlier but more recently discovered Mawangtui texts, and explains his preferences in choosing among textual variants. But most important for me, and for any student of the Tao Te Ching are his carefully selected commentaries which follow each verse. These show how the Chinese have traditionally understood the passages of the TTC in selected commentaries from the last 2000 years. Also, the book provides an extensive glossary of the Chinese terms and the commentators. Highly recommended!

Editorial Review:

Red Pine (a.k.a. Bill Porter) offers a new perspective on the Chinese classic Taoteching. A competent translator and interpreter of Chinese religion, he renders his work with an eye for detail and a spiritualism cultivated during years of Zen monastery living. It's odd that many read translations of Chinese classics as bare-bones texts, whereas no Chinese would tackle such obscurity in the absence of a helping hand from previous pundits. Fortunately, it is no longer necessary to rely on mystical insight in order to understand the Taoteching. Instead, we can look to the 12 or so commentators that Red Pine resurrects from Chinese history. With its clarity and scholarly range, this version of the Taoteching works as both a readable text and a valuable resource of Taoist interpretation.

An Enormous Crime: The Definitive Account of American POWs Abandoned in Southeast Asia

Bill Hendon, Elizabeth A. Stewart

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 25 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The dramatic history of living American soldiers left in Vietnam, and the first full account of the circumstances that left them there

An Enormous Crime is nothing less than shocking. Based on thousands of pages of public and previously classified documents, it makes an utterly convincing case that when the American government withdrew its forces from Vietnam, it knowingly abandoned hundreds of POWs to their fate. The product of twenty-five years of research by former Congressman Bill Hendon and attorney Elizabeth A. Stewart, An Enormous Crime brilliantly exposes the reasons why these American soldiers and airmen were held back by the North Vietnamese at Operation Homecoming in 1973 and what these men have endured since.
Despite hundreds of postwar sightings and intelligence reports telling of Americans being held captive throughout Vietnam and Laos, Washington did nothing. And despite numerous secret military signals and codes sent from the desperate POWs themselves, the Pentagon did not act. Even in 1988, a U.S. spy satellite passing over Sam Neua Province, Laos, spotted the twelve-foot-tall letters “USA” and immediately beneath them a huge, highly classified Vietnam War-era USAF/USN Escape & Evasion code in a rice paddy in a narrow mountain valley. The letters “USA” appeared to have been dug out of the ground, while the code appeared to have been fashioned from rice straw (see jacket photograph).
Tragically, the brave men who constructed these codes have not yet come home. Nor have any of the other American POWs who the postwar intelligence shows have laid down similar codes, secret messages, and secret authenticators in rice paddies and fields and garden plots and along trails in both Laos and Vietnam.
An Enormous Crime is based on open-source documents and reports, and thousands of declassified intelligence reports and satellite imagery, as well as author interviews and personal experience. It is a singular work, telling a story unlike any other in our modern history: ugly, harrowing, and true.
From the Bay of Pigs, where John and Robert Kennedy struck a deal with Fidel Castro that led to freedom for the Bay of Pigs prisoners, to the Paris Peace Accords, in which the authors argue Kissinger and Nixon sold American soldiers down the river for political gain, to a continued reluctance to revisit the possibility of reclaiming any men who might still survive, we have a story untold for decades. And with An Enormous Crime we have for the first time a comprehensive history of America’s leaders in their worst hour; of life-and-death decision making based on politics, not intelligence; and of men lost to their families and the country they serve, betrayed by their own leaders.

Here There Are Tigers: The Secret Air War in Laos, 1968-69 (Stackpole Military History Series)

Reginald Hathorn

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Editorial Review:

At the height of the Vietnam War, in 1968 and 1969, Reginald Hathorn flew 229 combat missions as a forward air controller for the U.S. Air Force. He inserted Special Forces teams into North Vietnam and Laos, completed missions for the CIA, and flew missions with the Lao Army. Most of the time, he flew into Laos and called in airstrikes against targets inside that country in a war which did not officially exist, about which the world knew nothing, and which the U.S. government denied.

Covert Ops: The CIA's Secret War In Laos

James E. Parker

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A Page Out Of History 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 15 people found this review helpful.

I served as Chief of Security for Air America in Thailand and Vietnam from 1967-1975. I enjoyed "Mule's" book very much. For those who shared Jim Parker's experiences you will relive old memories. For those who could not be there you will find the details fascinating. I would encourage you to read this one.

Editorial Review:

Uncommon war. Uncommon bonds.

In 1972, U.S. soldiers battle the North Vietnamese. Behind the headlines, a secret war rages in Laos. Sky, a close knit cadre of daredevil CIA agents, spearheads a daring operation. These gutsy secret agents direct a fearless force of Thai mercenaries and native Hmong tribespeople-- fighting the enemy toe-to-toe.

Now Sky veteran James Parker-- codename "Mule"-- reveals the untold story of the covert war in Laos. Parker takes you inside the often mind-boggling world of extraordinary men living and dying on the edge. Covert Ops captures the brutal training and ferocious land and air battles of Air Force Ravens, Air America, and young Hmong pilots. Above all, this first-person account shows the remarkable bonds formed between American soldiers and a courageous people-- who valiantly fought their fierce enemies to the very end.

A Daughter of Han: The Autobiography of a Chinese Working Woman

Ida Pruitt

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A Slice of Life 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 13 people found this review helpful.

Ning Lao Ta'i-ta'i. _The Autobiography of a Chinese Working Woman. Translated and Transcribed by Ida Pruitt. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967.

Every now and then I read an entire book in one for one or two reasons a) I have to read a book that I have put off for the time period in which I had to read it b) I become completely engrossed in it. I must say that, in the case of this book, it started off as the former and it ended up being the latter, although I still have to write a paper on it by tuesday.

This memoir was was orally transcribed by Ida Pruitt over a two year period in which Mrs. Ning visited her from 1936-38. Pruitt was forced to leave Beijing in 1938 when the Japanese invaded the series. In the brief introduction of the book, Pruitt informs the reader that she does not know what happened to Mrs. Ning after she returned to America. The brutallity of the Japanese army was not as great in Beijing as in such areas as Nanjing and Shanghai,but one can not help wondering about Mrs.Ning who the reader, or at least I, becomes quite attached to.

Mrs. Ning begins her tale by detailing how her family became established in the town of P'englai her family history is both entrenched in history and folklore and makes for a fascinting read. The book continues following her life from her childhood, marriage, hard times, working both for government officials and missionaries, and finally living in Beijing. The greatest thing about this book is the extraordinary detail Mrs. Ning goes into describing her everyday life. One can almost see oneself removing the fourth wall of the past and being able to see late Ching China. One gets to see a good picture of opium addiction and the dealings inside yamen, political offices, that are no longer controlled by skilled officials. A great book.

Flying Through Midnight: A Pilot's Dramatic Story of His Secret Missions Over Laos During the Vietnam War

John T. Halliday

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 83 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

When John Halliday arrived at Thailand's Nakhon Phanom Air Base in 1970, he thought the next year would bore him out of his skull. He believed his mission in the Vietnam War would be to fly cargo around Thailand. What could be easier? A couple of nights later, Halliday found himself dodging dozens of anti-aircraft shells in an aging cargo plane over the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Flying Through Midnight is his riveting account of his top-secret black-ops assignment--one of the most dangerous of the war.

Halliday flew slow propeller-driven relics at night deep into guerrilla territory in the "unofficial" war in Laos. His task with the 606th Special Operations Squadron was to help pinpoint guerrilla truck convoys for U.S. planes to bomb. Meanwhile, President Richard Nixon denied U.S. forces were fighting in Laos. Halliday wasn't even supposed to tell his wife what he was doing. His mail and phone calls were monitored, and soon he went from being a jittery FNG ("f---ing new guy") to a decorated war hero who logged 800 combat flight hours in Vietnam and the Gulf War. He was awarded the Air Force's Distinguished Flying Cross for one particularly amazing feat of bravery--a nighttime crash-landing on an unlit airstrip amid soaring mountains, which saved his crew. Flying Through Midnight does a remarkable job bringing to life Halliday's dramatic combat experiences, the foibles of his superiors, the brutalities of war, and the colorful quirks of his fellow flyboys, including his roommate whose favorite hobby was reading canned-food labels. There's not much here about the deeper rationale of the Vietnam War, but it's a gripping read. --Alex Roslin

Shooting at the Moon: The Story of America's Clandestine War in Laos

Roger Warner

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

This Title Also Known as "Back Fire" 5 out of 5 stars.
7 of 7 people found this review helpful.

Roger Warner has published the only comprehensive, unbiased account of the strange but tragic "sideshow" war in Laos, the mountainous, landlocked neighbour of Vietnam that was consumed in the same domino-theory meltdown as the two Vietnams and Cambodia, but which was assiduously kept out of the media's scrutiny for most of the 1960s. The sporadic war between the American-sponsored tribesmen and the communist Pathet Lao was wholly financed, on the American side, through the CIA, with unofficial air support from the USAF (traveling incognito) and private CIA front airline. Warner tells the story from several angles, including the zealous mid-western missionaries who traveled to Laos in the early 1960s to help improve agriculture, the often equally idealistic CIA field operatives who trained the tribesmen and the less saintly backroom boys in Washington who made sure Congress kept giving the money. He reserves special praise for the brave freelance journalists who helped expose the secret bombing, albeit all too late: by the end of the conflict there were parts of the Plain of Jars (a prominent Laotian land feature near the North Vietnamese border) that resembled a lunar surface.

For reasons obscure this title has a different paperback name ("Shooting at the Moon") than hardback ("Back Fire").

Editorial Review:

In Shooting at the Moon, Roger Warner chronicles a covert operation that used Hmong villagers as guerrilla fighters against the North during the Vietnamese War. Thought to be an expendable resource by Central Intelligence Agency strategists, the Hmong died by the thousands fighting the North Vietnamese. Those who survived were abandoned to their fate when the United States pulled out of the war. Warner's history is the moving and tragic story of how America's "secret war" devastated its own allies in Southeast Asia.

Escape From Laos

Dieter Dengler

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

shackletonesque 5 out of 5 stars.
9 of 9 people found this review helpful.

On February 1, 1966 the American pilot Dieter Dengler (1938-2001) took enemy fire and crash-landed his plane in Laos while on a secret mission. After surviving in the jungle on his own he was captured, tortured (hung upside down with an ant nest around his neck, submerged in a well, dragged by an ox through a village), then taken on a three-week jungle trek to a Pathet Lao prison camp called Par Kung. Dengler recalls that it was nothing like he imagined a prison camp might be, but instead a tiny enclave of a few huts exactly twenty-one by twenty-two steps in size. There he met six other POWS, two American and four Asian (which later became a source of tension), who had been imprisoned as long as two and a half years. Later they were transferred to the very similar Hoi Het camp. When starvation threatened both the prisoners and the guards, and the prisoners overheard the guards saying that they planned to shoot them, they made an elaborate plan and escaped. The fellow POWS were separated after the escape, and Dengler and his buddy Duane Martin teamed up. Lice, leeches, ticks, ants ("the true torment of the jungle"), sweltering days and cold nights, torrential rain, dumb mistakes and incredibly good luck, and the human will to survive--these are only part of Dengler's first person narrative. Incredibly, after soldiering on for so long, Dengler and Martin stumbled onto some villagers, scared them, and in the space of a minute they had beheaded Duane. After surviving twenty-three days in the jungle after his escape, hallucinations, wandering in a circle, tumbling over water falls, and eating things you never should eat, Dengler was rescued in an improbable stroke of luck. He lost sixty pounds in the six-month ordeal. In 1997 Werner Herzog made a documentary about Dengler called Little Dieter Needs to Fly. More recently Herzog dramatized this survivor's tale in the film Rescue Dawn (2007). This is a gripping book that reminded me of Alfred Lansing's Endurance about Shackleton's Antarctic survival story.

Editorial Review:

Dengler's story is a valuable contribution to the literature of survival as well as to the literature of the war.

Hmong in Minnesota (People of Minnesota)

Chia Vang

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Minnesota has always been a land of immigrants. Successive waves have each made their own way, found their place, and made it their home. The Hmong are one of the most recent immigrant groups, and their remarkable and moving story is told in Hmong in Minnesota.