Dragon Ascending: Vietnam and the Vietnamese by Henry KammReview by: Donald ZagoriaForeign Affairs, Vol. 75, No. 4 (Jul. - Aug., 1996), p. 161Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20047721 .

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Recent Books

Power and Diplomacy in the Pacific, by

michael p. Ryan. Washington:

Georgetown University Press, 1995, 228 pp. $42.50.

Now that the Cold War is over, trade

conflicts with Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and

China have been among the United States'

most challenging diplomatic problems. This timely volume analyzes the strategy and effectiveness of U.S. trade diplomacy toward its key East Asian trading partners. It examines a number of market-opening initiatives on the part of U.S. special trade

representatives under Section 301 of the

Trade Act, based on a variety of U.S. gov ernment and Gatt documents, legal briefs

filed with the U.S. government by trade

lawyers for the disputants, and extensive

interviews in Washington, Tokyo, Seoul, and Taipei. The result is a judicious analy sis of American economic policy in Asia,

exposing both its flaws and considerable achievements and highlighting the chal

lenges still awaiting gatt and the newly created World Trade Organization.

Dragon Ascending: Vietnam and the

Vietnamese, by henry kamm. New

York: Arcade Publishing, 1996, 304 pp. $24.95.

Kamm, a senior foreign correspondent for The New York Times, has been report

ing from Southeast Asia for more than

30 years, and he has an excellent knowl

edge of the history and politics of the re

gion. This is a rich report on Vietnam, the country, as

opposed to Vietnam, the

war, which has dominated the American

media. He concludes that Vietnam,

standing on its own after the collapse of

the Soviet Union and the loss of Soviet

aid, is a stable country that justifies

heightened confidence. He is optimistic about the prospects for "one Southeast

Asia" now that Vietnam has been admit

ted to the Association of Southeast Asian

Nations and has abandoned its designs for dominance over Laos and Cambodia.

Africa GAIL M. GERHART

Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa. by saul dubow. NewYork:

Cambridge University Press, 1995, 320 pp. $64.95 (paPer> $21.95).

Confirming the observation that all too

often yesterday's science is today's com

mon sense and tomorrow's nonsense,

this absorbing study scrutinizes a century of scientific and academic theorizing about race, highlighting the role of South Africans in the fields of physical and social anthropology, medicine, lin

guistics, psychology, history, and social

policy. From the quackery of phrenology, through Raymond Dart's claim to have

found the "missing link," to eugenicists' tocsins about human degeneration and

the infinitely malleable Hamitic myth, the author follows the dead-end trails of bio

logical determinism and social Darwinism

as they wind through laboratories, class

rooms, museums, libraries, and scientific

institutes, providing ample material for

political manipulation along the way. In

South Africa, the triumph of apartheid in the 1950s gave a new lease on life to racial

ideologies that after the defeat of Nazism were discredited elsewhere. While giving

To order any book reviewed or advertised in Foreign Affairs, fax 203-966-4329.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS July/August i996 [l6l]

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