John Terzano, Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation:
The Sister's stories tell of a remarkable journey from lives of privilege to lives of hardship, sacrifice, pain and loss all in the struggle for freedom and independence. While many Americans are familiar with the Vietnam Memorial Wall in DC and the thousands upon thousands of our stories of loss, sacrifice and heroism few know the stories on the other side of the wall—the stories of the Vietnamese. This book, chronicling and bringing to light the lives of these extraordinary women, is both necessary and integral to truly understand America's war in Vietnam.
Christopher Goscha, Université du Québec à Montréal:
What makes this book so important is that it takes us through the wars through the Sister's eyes, or at least how they recalled it in those conversations between 1988 and 2017 as Vietnam opened to the non-communist world. Each sister has a story to tell and each of them is well worth reading. There is a human touch to these souvenirs that will leave no reader indifferent.
Murray Hiebert, Center for Strategic and International Studies, author of Under Beijing's Shadow: Southeast Asia's China Challenge:
Norland's remarkable book pulls back the veil on a little understood facet of the Vietnam war: young women from an elite French school driven to join the resistance first against France and then the United States. Through sensitive interviews she teases out the motives of city girls from well-heeled families heading to the jungles where they endured bombing raids, malaria, deprivation and the ache of leaving their children and parents behind.
Christina Firpo, California Polytechnic State University:
The Saigon Sisters is a rare glimpse into the experience of young women during the Vietnamese Revolution, the Vietnam War, and communist Vietnam. Beautifully written, this book is a valuable contribution to women's history, as well as twentieth century Vietnamese history.
Ken Burns, Filmmaker:
The biographical sketches are introduced with very precise and accurate historical analysis. The nationalist puzzle is further understood by Norland's remarkable portraits of supporting characters. This book is destined to be a classic.
To read a good group biography is to come out with a different level of appreciation for the ways, trivial and tremendous, that humans influence one another... Norland tells the stories of nine [Vietnamese women] who chose to stay, and who, after spending their childhoods secretly dreaming of Vietnamese independence, found surprising ways into the resistance.
It is quite easy, and motivating as well, to imagine a course on Vietnamese history after World War II that includes only work by women and with The Saigon Sisters as a pivotal work connecting them all. As Norland's powerful oral-history recounting of the lives of this 'band of sisters' demonstrates, friendship and independence required vigilance but endured despite decades of war.
The literature on the war in Vietnam includes hundreds of first-person sources by men on all sides in the conflict, but fewer than a dozen books about women are in print. Thus this collection of oral history interviews by Norland (formerly, US Department of State) is an important contribution.
[Norland] gives [these women] a platform to talk directly to the reader[,] thereby revealing the women's double and even multiple lives, full of contradiction and inner conflicts caused by the complexity and long duration of the war years. The Saigon Sisters is a substantial collection of thoughts, memories, moments of pain and joy in individual lives.
This is a well-written, incredibly valuable book. Highly recommended.
To put it mildly, these stories are gripping.
In recording the histories and putting them to print, Patricia Norland succeeded in capturing an important slice of history and the very personal story of exemplary women.
