General works
The whole war
- Logevall, Fredrik. Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam. New York: Random House, 2012. Pulitzer-winning, and the best account of how the Republic came to exist at all.
- Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A History. New York: Viking, 1983. The standard general narrative; dated in places, still the best single volume for a first reader.
- Nguyen, Lien-Hang T. Hanoi's War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. From the Vietnamese archives, and the book that dismantled the idea that Hanoi's leadership was united.
- Asselin, Pierre. Vietnam's American War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
- Hastings, Max. Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy 1945–1975. London: William Collins, 2018.
- Miller, Edward. Misalliance: Ngô Đình Diệm, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. The serious modern reassessment of Diệm, and the best book about the Republic as a state.
Chapters I–IV
Geneva, Diệm and the Republic
- Chapman, Jessica M. Cauldron of Resistance: Ngô Đình Diệm, the United States, and 1950s Southern Vietnam. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013.
- Jacobs, Seth. Cold War Mandarin. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.
- Fall, Bernard B. Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Điện Biên Phủ. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1967. By a French-American scholar who was killed in Vietnam in 1967. Still the best account.
- Windrow, Martin. The Last Valley. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004.
- Catton, Philip E. Diệm's Final Failure. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002. On the strategic hamlet programme.
Chapters V–VII
The American war
- Sheehan, Neil. A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. New York: Random House, 1988. The best book about the war by some distance, and about the gap between reports and reality.
- Herr, Michael. Dispatches. New York: Knopf, 1977. Not history. The best writing to come out of it.
- Hersh, Seymour M. My Lai 4. New York: Random House, 1970.
- Prados, John. Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009.
- Wiest, Andrew. Vietnam's Forgotten Army: Heroism and Betrayal in the ARVN. New York: NYU Press, 2008. On the South Vietnamese army, which almost nobody writes about.
- Elliott, David W. P. The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta. Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 2003.
Chapter VIII and after
1975, the boat people and the aftermath
- Willbanks, James H. Abandoning Vietnam. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004.
- Veith, George J. Black April: The Fall of South Vietnam 1973–75. New York: Encounter Books, 2012.
- Nguyen, Viet Thanh. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. On how the war is remembered, by a novelist who left Saigon as a child in 1975.
- Vo, Nghia M. The Vietnamese Boat People, 1954 and 1975–1992. Jefferson: McFarland, 2006.
- Bui Tin. Following Ho Chi Minh. Trans. Judy Stowe and Do Van. London: Hurst, 1995. By the North Vietnamese colonel who took the surrender at the palace, and later defected.
Memoir and fiction
First-hand, and near enough
- Greene, Graham. The Quiet American. London: Heinemann, 1955. Written before the Republic existed, and it predicts almost everything.
- Bao Ninh. The Sorrow of War. Trans. Frank Palmos. London: Secker & Warburg, 1993. A North Vietnamese soldier's novel, and the finest fiction from any side of this war.
- O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.
- Duong Thu Huong. Novel Without a Name. Trans. Phan Huy Duong and Nina McPherson. New York: Morrow, 1995.
- Nguyen, Viet Thanh. The Sympathizer. New York: Grove Press, 2015. Fiction, and the best single account of what the evacuation and the exile felt like.