Review by Choice Review
Stern, an assistant secretary of defense for regional affairs, carefully reconstructs General Secretary Nguyen Van Linh's partially successful programs. Using records of party congresses and other meetings, and newspaper stories and press releases, the author presents a well-informed but quite narrowly designed monograph that reads like a government report. Stern rarely leaves the documents to discuss the stick-figure people involved in his potentially interesting story. He shows how Linh began to open up the party to dissent and media criticism, to recruit new progressive members, and to separate its activities from those of the government and the nonparty bureaucracy in an attempt to facilitate economic reform and modernization. Although Linh made some progress, the slow rate of economic development, the dissolution of the Soviet bloc and, especially, the resistance and resiliency of the party conservatives combined to foil his programs by 1991. Researchers; faculty. M. Small; Wayne State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
