Cassell, 2003, $24.95, ISBN 0-304-35210-1, 448 pages, oversize trade paper

Like the WWII Encyclopedia before it, Vietnam: A Visual Encyclopedia offers alphabetical entries of people, places, and things pertaining to the Vietnam War. Just about every entry includes photos, about half color and half black and white, for illustration.

As usual for such a book, entries are short overviews, not in depth chronicles. However, like a coffee table book, you can find yourself poking around for quite some time.

The photo selection is an excellent montage of leaders, weapons, and so forth, with combat photos interspersed.

A nit, rather nits, to pick: the digitization of photos is sloppy in many cases, as pixelization ruins some of the photos. This mostly occurs with color, but some black and white as well. The bottom of page 133 and page 154 are good examples. These may be frames from videos, but in any case, more attention to the pre-press process is warranted. It's a bit jarring considering the overall quality of all the other photos.

Overall the concept remains sound and I found myself picking up this book more than once to flip to a random page and start reading. Of course, that would lead to another and another, and I'd end up looking up one thing or another. The more you don't know, the more interesting the encyclopedia.