As Carol Wilder explains it, the act of crossing the street in Hanoi serves as a metaphor for ‘moving forward hopefully and unscathed in many aspects of life in Vietnam’ (p. 3). The engagement with Vietnam that led her to Hanoi and to her new book dates from her days as a university student and her opposition to United States' involvement in the conflicts that engulfed the country after the end of colonial rule in 1945. In the 1980s she began teaching a class entitled ‘Vietnam: Rhetoric and realities’ at San Francisco State University. She visited Vietnam for the first time in 1993, and has since returned multiple times, helping to develop a Media Studies class at Hanoi University and in 2007 spending a year in the country as a Fulbright Scholar.

The book's lively prose and its generous use of illustrations reveal it as intended to be read as part of an undergraduate course or by the general audience of readers with an interest in Vietnam. Much of its content is based on lectures Wilder first wrote for her classes in the 1980s and ‘90s, supplemented by several new chapters emerging from her time in Vietnam, and all interspersed with personal experiences and anecdotes. Chapters juxtapose different representations of the conflict with more personal accounts intended to ‘put a human face on what was an inhuman experience’ (p. 23). Topics include the Hỏa Lò prison, Hồ Chí Minh, returned American veterans, and Graham Greene's novel, The Quiet American.

The results are uneven. The chapter describing her students' projects on the Long Biên Bridge, for example, is one of the freshest and most engaging; by contrast, her analysis of the Rambo phenomenon, despite references to recent reinterpretations, feels dated. After all, even Sylvester has moved on and John Rambo's angst has mellowed into Barney Ross's resigned — and mercenary — expendability. This orientation towards the 1980s and ‘90s deprives Wilder not only of the opportunity to reflect on the evolving nature of American military interventions, but also of the opportunity to engage with more recent films such as Randall Wallace's We were soldiers (2002), a film of considerable relevance to the ‘revisionist’ school of right-leaning American scholarship on the conflict that the author criticises.

Despite her description of the book as ‘a work with no particular ideology’ (p. 9), Wilder is clearly partial to what has been described as the ‘orthodox’ school of American scholarship on the conflict in Vietnam (for a thorough treatment of the two positions see Andrew Wiest and Michael Doidge, eds., Triumph revisited: Historians battle for the Vietnam War). Her sources on Vietnam are few, and generally limited to scholars prominent in the 1980s, and ‘90s such as Frances Fitzgerald, George Herring, Marilyn Young, and William Duiker (repeatedly misspelled as ‘Druicker’ in pp. 64, 65, 250). For Wilder, the ‘American War in Vietnam was a catastrophic blind date set up by the French and fuelled by a toxic fear of communism and a near-psychotic avoidance of losing face’ (p. 5). Hồ Chí Minh was a ‘mysterious hero of Vietnamese independence’ who ‘looked to the West and to the United States in particular in support of his country's freedom’ (p. 6). The Republic of Vietnam based in Vietnam's South appears only as part of an American ‘rhetorical sleight of hand’ that required ‘a willing suspension of disbelief usually seen only in front of the theatrical fourth wall’ (p. 127). Accounts like these are increasingly untenable in light of work by scholars like Tuong Vu, Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Edward Miller, Peter Hansen, Nu-Anh Tran, Mathew Masur, Philip Catton, Jessica Chapman, and Wynn Gadkar-Wilcox. Moreover they reflect an unwillingness to engage with the complexity of Vietnamese history and to acknowledge the sacrifices made by those who sought to realise alternative visions of the nation.

Wilder's book provides a revealing window on the politics behind this orthodox perspective and its enduring hold on elements of the American consciousness. She shares with readers key moments in the development of her political engagement, from the shootings at Kent State University in 1970 to her troubled relationship with a returned American serviceman, to her first meetings with Vietnamese officials in the 1980s. These were undoubtedly powerful, formative experiences that have contributed to what she describes as her ‘inchoate desire to make any amends possible for the hardships and losses that have been visited upon the Vietnamese people and the many U.S. veterans’ (p. 21).

Yet along with this admirable desire for healing and reconciliation comes a cultural incomprehension that echoes the attitudes of the very American policymakers she once opposed. Illustrations of dog carcasses for sale in the former 19 tháng 12 Market in Hanoi (Fig. 2.4, mislabelled as ‘Dog Market, Thuong Kiet Street’) or of a motorcycle used to transport her computer equipment (Fig. 5.2) symbolise a world that remains largely opaque for the author. She opines that ‘[c]rosscultural mystification is almost inevitably the result as East and West try to fathom each other’ (p. 111). Part of the problem is that in Vietnam, ‘[t]he fact and fiction distinction still made in Western thinking, however fuzzily, does not seem to apply at all’ (p. 118). She breezily dismisses a rich and varied intellectual tradition stretching back more than two millennia when she describes the country as having ‘no history of media education, critical thinking, or open expression’ (p. 7).

As passages like these suggest, despite the book's title Wilder remains trapped on the side of the street, unable or unwilling to make the crossing from the black-and-white politics of 1970s America to the complex and colourful reality that is Vietnam. When I received my copy of Crossing the street in Hanoi: Teaching and learning about Vietnam, I was surprised to find it features the author's photo of a Hanoi shopkeeper wearing a mask of Sun Wukong, the trickster Monkey King of Wu Cheng'en's sixteenth-century Chinese classic, Journey to the West. As I read the book, though, I couldn't help thinking it was an apt choice for a book that promises to take readers to Vietnam, yet delivers them to a very different destination.