The House on Dream Street by Dana Sachs (Seal Press)

It's easy to fall in love with a country--travelers do it all the time. It's far more difficult to extend that infatuation into a long-term relationship, as Dana Sachs discovers when she moves to Hanoi.

An independent American with a fledgling grasp of Vietnamese, Dana soon discovers that in her new home she has all the authority of a three-year-old child, coupled with the notoriety of Brittany Spears. Soon after her arrival she realizes "I would always stand out in a crowd--bigger, paler, and richer than everyone else." She is told about another American woman who had lived in Hanoi and was so besieged by attention that she retreated to her room and refused to leave until the day that she flew back to the States. Keeping this example in mind, Dana forces herself out into public view, learning to be comfortable within Hanoi's teeming streets and in the home of the family who rent her a room and slowly absorb her into their domestic scene.

She quickly learns key phrases, the most useful being "I don't know how to eat it." This, her Vietnamese friend, Tra, who has lived in America tells her, is a polite way to refuse unwanted food, and it rescues Dana from eating an egg that she thought was hardboiled but turns out to be a baby chick in embryo.

"You should try it. It's delicious," Tra tells Dana later, adding sympathetically that she had a similar experience in the States with mashed potatoes--"All that butter and cream--disgusting! How can people eat that?"

Learning the language helps build Dana's confidence and allows her to become closer to the family in whose house she lives. She enters a different time zone, spending hours sitting with her landlady Huong in a living room whose folding doors when opened exposed the entire room to the street. "It was hard," Dana remarks, "to know where the inside stopped and the outside world began." Sitting on a sofa that was almost on the sidewalk, Dana discovers how a public world can also be deeply personal, and how "relaxing" does not need to "involve some action verb." As they sit together Dana and Huong become friends and Dana becomes part of a small part of Hanoi.

Certain stereotypes persist. Dana continues to see Hanoi through a filter of past war stories, and many men of Hanoi continue to see her as an easy conquest, since she is of course American. A meeting with a man who claimed to have rescued John McCain when the downed pilot was floundering in Hanoi's Western Lake brings Dana to an unexpected affinity with Phai, a motorcycle mechanic, whose gentle kindness provides a restful sanctuary from an endless barrage of things to learn.

It's easy to fall in love with a man who in some ways personifies the country that she loves--it's far less easy, Dana discovers, to extend that infatuation into the same sort of long-term relationship that she has with Vietnam. And yet the attraction becomes a lasting friendship, as Vietnam becomes a second home, while changing over time as much as Dana and Phai do. The vivid and careful chronicling of Vietnam as it enters a new, peaceful, and prosperous century makes this book an important historical document as much as it is an engaging piece of travel literature that deserves to become a classic.

All the Wrong Places: Adrift in the Politics of the Pacific Rim by James Fenton (Atlantic Monthly Press)

"Horrible" is James Fenton's assessment of contemporary journalism, a discipline that prevents reporters from writing as though "they are present at the events they are describing. And not only present--alive, conscious, and with a point of view."

These are also prerequisites for being a poet, which Fenton is, so he is well-prepared to practice what he calls "something that predates journalism," the narrative form that is "reporting in its natural state."

Rather than the recital of facts that come from the mouths of journalists, Fenton is obsessed with the details that give depth and color to a narrative, and it is his gift for finding small, particular, idiosyncratic features that gives his reportage strength. When he is without these, as he is in the portion of this book that is set in Korea,he ventures into Fire in the Lake territory, about which he says, "the purpose of the book seemed to be to warn you off the subject." When he encounters the right people, as he does in the Philippines when he meets Helen, an American Meryl Streep look-alike who has become so immersed in her chosen home that she speaks English with a Filipino accent, he gets to the bones of his story. And when he writes about a part of the world that has claimed him, as Southeast Asia has, he is opinionated, at times thoroughly obnoxious, and absolutely unbeatable.

A man with a passion for Cambodia, Fenton went to Saigon a week after the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh, six days before the Americans left Vietnam. He had been to Vietnam before, where his English had been found wanting by a Viet Cong soldier when he had failed to respond to "How are you?" with the obligatory response "Fine thanks, and you?" He had been to a village on the border between Cambodia and Vietnam that was "a hypermarket of contraband" where every man, woman and child spent their time gambling,like "some allegorical town, say in the Pilgrim's Progress" while they waited for the Khmer Rouge to come and buy weapons. He had traveled through a village that had been destroyed by napalm, where he "noticed a pile of bananas that had been charred right through, although they preserved their original shape...like something discovered and preserved in Pompeii. The bodies had already been cleared away."

In Saigon as the city prepares for its fall, Fenton watches the appearance of the giant helicopters that complete the American evacuation as they darken the sky for hours, their noise "a fearful incentive to panic." The looting of the embassy begins as the last helicopters were landing on the roof and when Fenton enters the building he is greeted by "suspicious looks, so I began to do a little looting myself in order to show that I was entering into the spirit of the thing." When the liberating forces entered Saigon, their first view was of people laden with booty, which Fenton remarks, must have confirmed their belief in urban degeneracy.

Flagging down a tank with an NLF flag as it approaches the Presidential Palace, Fenton is hauled aboard and told to keep his head down. As the tank enters the palace gate and the immortality of history, its hitch-hiking poet observes "an extraordinary number of dragonflies in the air."

With the advent of peace the streets of Saigon became filled with the abandoned uniforms of the Saigon Army, "piles of clothes, boots, and weapons...so complete it looked as though their former occupant had simply melted into his boots;" stalls of looted goods whose chief customers, Fenton says, were the NLF, as well as the French residents of the city and journalists; billowing parachutes of various colors that sheltered impromptu cafes and "made the city utterly beautiful;" and the wives of military officers who took to the streets in protest when their husbands were sent away to reeducation camps where, rumor claimed, thousands had been killed.

If God is in the details, then James Fenton's writing must certainly qualify as some kind of sacred text. Read it and weep and pray that he may someday do this again.