Vietnam Images: A World of Decent Dreams

by Jeffrey Hantover

Vietnam and its people come alive in this visual journey beyond headlines and preconceptions. From village huts to the neon bustle of Ho Chi Minh City, engaging and riveting images present a Vietnam where tradition still thrives in a changing social landscape, where the bonds of community and family, to ancestors and to the land, remain defining constants. We see Vietnam at work, in rice fields and on city streets, at play and in prayer, and at family and communal rituals of life and death.Vietnamese poems, prose, and proverbs dating back eight centuries evocatively underscore the continuities amidst change, while Jeffrey Hantover's lucid text offers social and cultural context to the lives so warmly portrayed. Vietnam Images does not pull back from the toil and struggle of daily Vietnamese life, yet surprises with its broad embrace of a people sustained by tradition and alive to the promises of the future.

160 pages, Hardcover

First published November 25, 2007

About the author

Jeffrey Hantover was born and grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. He graduated from Harvard College, attended the John F. Kennedy School of Government and received a Masters in Sociology of Education and PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago. He taught sociology at Vanderbilt University, was the director of a national social service agency in New York, and held senior positions in labor rights compliance for a major American clothing company. Jeffrey lived in Hong Kong for twelve years where he wrote on Asian art and culture. It was while in Hong Kong that he began work on The Jewel Trader of Pegu. He now lives in New York with his wife Mee-Seen Loong. He is currently working on another novel.