All the Wrong Places: Adrift in the Politics of the Pacific Rim

Have to hand it to Fenton. He manages to be at the right place at the right time: on the streets of Saigon the day it fell; raiding Imelda Marcos' private quarters just after she and her husband fled the Phillipines, and making off with a monogrammed bath towel for proof. Not just about what happened, but what it felt like to be there, both to Fenton and the people around him. Subjective? Maybe. But some of things he saw and wrote about are never going to make the mainstream history books. An entertaining read, and a good adjunct to more scholarly books about the fall of Vietnam, the end of the Marcos regime in the Phillipines, and a little-known (in the U.S.) revolt against the authoritarian regime in Korea. Just a point of information: in the memorably humorous travel memoir "Into the Heart of Borneo," author Redmond O'Hanlon recounts his trip to the Borneo outback with his friend James Fenton -- the same James Fenton who wrote "All the Wrong Places."