Overview

What does censorship do to a culture? How do censors justify their work? What are the mechanisms by which censorship - and self-censorship - alter people's sense of time and memory, truth and reality? Thomas Bass faced these questions when The Spy Who Loved Us, his account of the famous Time magazine journalist and double agent Pham Xuan An, was published in a Vietnamese edition. When the book finally appeared in 2014, after five years of negotiations with Vietnamese censors, more than four hundred passages had been altered or cut from the text. After the book was published, Bass flew to Vietnam to meet his censors, at least the half dozen who would speak with him. In Censorship in Vietnam, he describes these meetings and examines how censorship works, both in Vietnam and elsewhere in the world. An exemplary piece of investigative reporting, Censorship in Vietnam opens a window into the country today and shows us the precarious nature of intellectual freedom in a world governed by suppression.

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9781625342959

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Censorship in Vietnam: Brave New World brings forth a compelling fight between censorship and the freedom of the press that many modern countries take for granted. --Communication Booknotes Quarterly Bass's deadpan account of his (largely failed) struggles with members of the publishing-house staff who censor his book captures something of the Kafkaesque environment in which all Vietnamese intellectual discourse inside the country is policed... Censorship in Vietnam provides a fascinating glipse into a critically important but poorly understood dimension of contemporary Vietnamese life. --Mekong Review Censorship in Vietnam is rich, poignant, and comes complete with perspectives from both sides of the fight, the censors and the censored... Most interesting, still, are Bass's conversations with the Vietnamese editors, censors, and publishers, the very hands that carry out acts of censorship. What they reveal, crucially, is how censorship takes place. --Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly

Censorship in Vietnam: Brave New World brings forth a compelling fight between censorship and the freedom of the press that many modern countries take for granted. --Communication Booknotes Quarterly Censorship in Vietnam is rich, poignant, and comes complete with perspectives from both sides of the fight, the censors and the censored... Most interesting, still, are Bass's conversations with the Vietnamese editors, censors, and publishers, the very hands that carry out acts of censorship. What they reveal, crucially, is how censorship takes place. --Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly Bass's deadpan account of his (largely failed) struggles with members of the publishing-house staff who censor his book captures something of the Kafkaesque environment in which all Vietnamese intellectual discourse inside the country is policed... Censorship in Vietnam provides a fascinating glipse into a critically important but poorly understood dimension of contemporary Vietnamese life. --Mekong Review

Author Information

Thomas A. Bass is professor of English and journalism at the University at Albany.

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