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mosesp's review against another edition
5.0
I found this book surprisingly emotional to read. Fall is an historian, and the book is full of detail on military maneuvers and political scheming. But what comes through paragraph by paragraph is the voice of a witness-- a man who was on the ground through all of the fighting and killing and dying, and is delicately attuned to the fundamental misunderstandings and failures of judgement that led to so much destruction. Written in 1961 and updated in 1964, the book was both a scholarly retrospective and an explicit warning to contemporary US decision-makers. Read 50 years later, it pains the reader to know that that warning was ignored, and that another round of blood-letting began soon after. And what's more, although this book and its author are quite well-known in military circles, recent conflicts around the world call into question whether we have been able to translate understanding into change.
bobbo49's review against another edition
4.0
Although I have known of Bernard Fall's prescient books about the 1950s French war in Vietnam for many years, I hadn't gotten around to reading any of them until now. Street Without Joy is an inside look at how the French lost Vietnam, first published in 1961 and updated in 1964 with some very explicit warnings to the Americans about the nature of the war they were then entering. Would that Fall's book had been better disseminated and scrutinized by America's leadership in those years: his descriptions of political vs. military war, and the ineffectiveness of technological warfare against an indigenous and guerilla opponent, proved all too painfully accurate. History told as contemporary reportage; do we ever learn from the mistakes of others, let alone our own mistakes?
garyboland's review against another edition
4.0
A particularly strong second half eclipses a workmanlike first. The author expertly traces the common strands of successful revolutionary war and makes the case that technical superiority is useless against popular support
jimg's review
A terrific book that provides grim details about the folly of attempting to fight ideology with military technology alone. Most of Fall's book deals with the French loss of the territory that became North Vietnam. Near the end we find the US making the same errors as the French in trying to "liberate" South Vietnam.
Fall asks why it is that we need to pit elite Western forces with all manner of technically superior fire power against relatively poorly trained and only rarely equally equipped rebel troops. His answer:
"The answer is very simple: It takes all the technical proficiency our system can provide to make up for the woeful lack of popular support and political savvy of most of the regimes that the West has thus far sought to prop up."
This point could be repeated in a variety of ways -- and Fall does. He notes early on in the book that the failure of the French to insist on land reform, thus freeing the vast number of people in the country from an oppressive elite of landed gentry essentially doomed the French military efforts to certain failure despite all of their gallantry.
Fall asks why it is that we need to pit elite Western forces with all manner of technically superior fire power against relatively poorly trained and only rarely equally equipped rebel troops. His answer:
"The answer is very simple: It takes all the technical proficiency our system can provide to make up for the woeful lack of popular support and political savvy of most of the regimes that the West has thus far sought to prop up."
This point could be repeated in a variety of ways -- and Fall does. He notes early on in the book that the failure of the French to insist on land reform, thus freeing the vast number of people in the country from an oppressive elite of landed gentry essentially doomed the French military efforts to certain failure despite all of their gallantry.
petezilla's review
4.0
Really fantastic book - the author really captures well the sights, sounds, and smells of the conflict and depicts with incredible detail the strategic decisions down to the hilarious (or sad) anecdotes of the men and women involved. I wish I personally had read this book 5 deployments ago, but I only join a long list of Americans across the decades who should have done so.
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