Saigon, Vietnam

Insight Guides: Ho Chi Minh City & Hanoi Smart Guide (Insight Smart Guides)

Amazon Price: $6.42 (as of 06/04/2012)

A brand new series from Insight brings you the Smart Guide to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. The unique and innovative A-Z format of Smart Guides allows you to plan your trip according to your own personal taste. Themed headings cover over 400 amazing things to see and do from architecture, history and hotels to museums, restaurants, shopping and much more for a truly tailor-made, individual travel experience. Area overviews conveniently highlight the best each area has to offer, from elegant Hanoi and bustling Ho Chi Minh City to their surrounding areas, including information on excursions to Cat Ba, Con Dao and Phuc Quoc. The main attractions explored within these historic cities include Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum, Hoan Kiem Lake and the striking Opera House, Independence Palace, the War Remnants Museum and the Jade Emperor Pagoda. A special chapter features guidance through Vietnam's war trail. The guide also contains a street atlas with full index and detailed mapping which is cross-referenced to the main text for ease of use. The front-cover flap highlights all the top sights of the destination for quick reference whilst the back-cover flap provides useful phrases to help you get by, along with other useful contact information. Smart Guides - the smart way to navigate.

The Quiet American (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

by: Graham Greene

Amazon Price: $6.25 (as of 06/04/2012)

Graham Greene wrote this novel in 1955. It's set in the early fifties when Vietnam was still Indo-China and there was a war raging between the French and the Vietnamese. It's obvious he's worried about the future and American involvement, and this theme resonates throughout the book as well as gives an eerie foreshadowing of what we all know happened later. At only 188 pages, it's a seemingly simple story of mystery, adventure and love. But it's also a story of a people, a place and a time as well as a warning about the future.

The Quiet American

Amazon Price: $8.78 (as of 06/04/2012)

The Quiet American proves that elegant and intelligent filmmaking can be emotionally powerful. Michael Caine plays Thomas Fowler, a British journalist in 1950s Vietnam with a lovely Vietnamese mistress named Phuong (Do Thi Hai Yen) and a jaded view of the political strife teeming around him. He befriends a seemingly innocuous American named Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser), who falls in love with Phuong--and slowly, Pyle's real purpose in Vietnam becomes revealed. Fowler finds that, to hold on to the carefully balanced life he's created for himself, he must make choices he's long avoided. Caine and Fraser are both superb and give a human face to complicated politics; as a result, The Quiet American manages to be compelling as both history and a story about very specific people embroiled in a very personal conflict. An impressive film from director Philip Noyce (Rabbit-Proof Fence, Patriot Games).