First of all, I 'd like to say Thank you to Canadian Maple Leaf for your excellent commenting job on that Communist. I praise you for having by far such a good knowledge of Viet Nam history. You're the few Westerners who truly know what you're talking about when it comes to South-East Asia.
Ironically, the person who knows the most about Viet Nam is not Vietnamese and the person who lives in Vietnam doesn't know anything about the country he lives in.
The Communists in Viet Nam either have put our intellectuals, scientists, religious and political leaders (others than Communists) in jail or Re-education camps or chased them off from the country.
The Communists, much like Hitler did for Germany, have vowed to clean Viet Nam from all its cultural values and history by burning books and tearing down monuments and re-write Viet Nam history according to them.
So you can only expect so much when it comes to logical arguments or even good knowledge of history or political subjects when talking to one of them.
This is just to give you all a perspective of what is happening.

Well... enough of the political side. Back to the book.

It is an awesome book people! Read it if you'd like to learn more about Viet Nam History. A great job by the author in putting together so much details and researches. Many Foreigners as much as Vietnamese will learn a lot from this book.
Viet Nam has 4,000 years of history; much of it has been lost during the last 50 years, mainly because of the war and cleansing by the Communists.
This book compiled a great deal of information for people like me who'd like to start piecing together the "whole picture". Because I would have not been allowed to do so in Viet Nam.

Thanks.

I don't think one needs to engage in chest-thumping nationalism to praise Taylor's work. The book is a beautiful example of solid scholarship. Taylor uses both Chinese and Vietnamese primary sources and compares them to give a more realistic picture behind the nationalist myths that Vietnamese schoolchildren (both North and South) have been taught for decades. Taylor also draws upon a large body of secondary sources in Chinese, Vietnamese, French, English, and Japanese. I doubt that there is ANY scholarship on this period of Vietnamese history in either Vietnamese or English that is of a higher quality than this. A work of lucid writing founded on excellent research.

this book will let the world knows who were the true one that came up with such inventions instead of the Chinese as previously thought.