Speaking Out in Vietnam: Public Political Criticism in a Communist Party–Ruled Nation. By Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2019. 246 pp. ISBN: 9781501736384 (cloth)

Kerkvliet paints a more nuanced and subtler picture, showing that public criticism of the regime and political mobilization have grown dramatically over time, involving a wide-ranging set of actors from rural peasants to factory workers to elites in the party-state architecture. [...]the regime has dealt with these protests in variety of ways. The book builds upon Kerkvliet's distinguished career studying Vietnamese politics and an extensive database he has developed through online materials (both pro- and anti-regime) that covers every public political criticism he could identify between 2002 and 2015 related to labor strikes, land disputes, national security (particularly international relations with China), and calls for democratization. [...]Kerkvliet presents each of the different protest types thematically rather than chronologically, trying to identify common themes in his database that are persistent over time.