Vietnamese cultural researcher and author Huu Ngoc’s latest book entitled Vietnam: Tradition and Change will be launched in Hanoi soon.

At 98 years old, Ngọc is among Vietnam‘s most famous scholars and among the country‘s keenest observers of traditional Vietnamese culture and history.  

The new book, edited by Lady Borton and Elizabeth Collins, is a selection of the author’s essays which had been printed in his book Wandering through Vietnamese Culture, the only English language book to win Vietnam’s Gold Book Prize.

The book is an introduction to the country’s rich history, culture, and daily life.

The book is published by the Vietnam’s The Gioi (World) Publishers and the US’s Ohio University Press.

After the launch in Hanoi, it will be published by the Ohio University Press in the US in June.

On the Ohio University Press’s website, the book is described as “an accessible and erudite primer on Vietnamese history and culture from one of Vietnam’s finest minds”.

 “The author’s central theme—that all tradition is change through acculturation—twines through each of the book’s ten sections, which contain Huu Ngoc’s ideas on Vietnamese religion, literature, history, exemplary figures, and more. Taken on its own, each brief essay is an engaging discussion of key elements of Vietnamese culture and the history of an issue confronting Vietnam today,” said the website.

For twenty years, Ngoc wrote a Sunday column in French for Le Courier du Vietnam (The Vietnam Mail). An English version appeared as ―Traditional Miscellany in Vietnam News. He collected 1,255 pages from these essays into the book Wandering through Vietnamese Culture.

VNS