Book review: Saigon at war: South Vietnam and the global sixties by Heather Marie Stur

In Saigon At War: South Vietnam and the Global Sixties, Heather Marie Stur challenges the conventional depiction of South Vietnam as a ‘pawn rather than an actor’, examining its wartime experience by focusing on its civil society, its social groups and activists who demanded a democratic form of government and breathed life into democratic citizenship and national politics. Rather than position this short-lived nation as the backdrop for other actors’ accounts of the wartime era, this book provides a welcome look at an understudied topic and uses vivid anecdotes and portraits to examine South Vietnam’s interior life, writes Ben Margulies. Saigon At War: South Vietnam and the Global Sixties. Heather Marie Stur. Cambridge University Press. 2020