Book description
Last Night I Dreamed of Peace is the moving diary kept by a
27-year-old Vietnamese doctor who was killed by the Americans during
the Vietnam War, while trying to defend her patients. Not only is it
an important slice of history, from the opposite side of Dispatches
and Apocalypse Now, but it shows the diarist - Dang Thuy
Tram - as a vibrant human being, full of youthful idealism, a poetic
longing for love, trying hard to be worthy of the Communist Party and
doing her best to look after her patients under appalling conditions.
She wrote straight from the heart and, because of this, her diary
has been a huge bestseller in Vietnam - 350,000 copies sold in 2005
alone. Rider brings the first English translation, in book form, to
the Commonwealth markets.
Dang Thuy Tram was the daughter of a prosperous family of doctors. In
1967, at the age of 24, she volunteered to serve as a doctor in a
Vietcong battlefield hospital in the Quan Ngai Province. From 1968 to
1970 she kept a diary recording her experiences of the conflict in
compelling and honest terms. She was killed by American forces in 1970.
