Red riders: The cover of scholar Hữu Ngọc’s new book Việt Nam:Tradition and Change . Photo courtesy of Thế giới Publishers.

Viet Nam News

HÀ NỘI – Vietnamese cultural researcher and author Hữu Ngọc’s latest book entitled Việt Nam: Tradition and Change will be launched in Hà Nội soon.

At 98 years old, Ngọc is among Việt Nam‘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 Việt Nam’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 Việt Nam’s Thế Giới (World) Publishers and the US’s Ohio University Press.

After the launch in Hà Nội, 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 Việt Nam’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 Hữu Ngọc’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 Việt Nam today,” said the website.

For twenty years, Ngọc wrote a Sunday column in French forLe Courier du Vietnam (The Việt Nam Mail). An English version appeared as ―Traditional Miscellany in Việt Nam News. He collected 1,255 pages from these essays into the bookWandering through Vietnamese Culture. -- VNS