Giap--Volcano Under Snow

British diplomat Colvin, who served as consul in Hanoi during the 1960s, can't quite keep a focus in this loosely structured biography concerning Vo Nguyen Giap's controversial career as a self-taught general and key figure in the Vietnamese revolution. Instead, he regularly drifts away from Giap to present a highly impressionistic narrative of the First and Second Indochina Wars. Colvin's bibliography lists archival material from France, the U.K. and the U.S. Even casual students, however, may perceive the author's heavy reliance on such standard accounts as Bernard Fall's Street Without Joy and Gunther Levy's America in Vietnam. Colvin's analysis of Giap seems to be similarly derived in large part from Robert O'Neill's General Giap and Peter Macdonald's Giap: Victor in Vietnam. The author's interpretation of Giap as a first-rate practitioner of war as a synthesis of military and political approaches is defensible, albeit conventional. But his insistence that Giap, rather than his Chinese ""advisors,"" planned the Dien Bien Phu campaign of 1953-1954 must be evaluated in the context of Quang Zhai's trailblazing article ""Transplanting the Chinese Model"" in The Journal of Military History (October 1993). More generally, Colvin's case for the success of Vietnamization after 1969 seems seriously overstated, as does his argument that South Vietnam's collapse in 1975 was in good part the result of abandonment by the U.S. Neither position is sustained by the limited scholarship of a work that is more a personal statement than a serious intellectual contribution. (Aug.)