The true story of author Ralph White's effort to save the entire staff of the Saigon branch of Chase Manhattan bank and their families before the city fell to the North Vietnamese Army.
Captivating ... White is at his storytelling best when recounting his frenetic shuttling between the U.S. Embassy, the Saigon airport, hotel cafes and seedy bars in search of clear-eyed American officials who might help ... it’s hard not to admire him for his pluckiness in the face of bureaucratic indifference as well as his growth from a risk-taking adventurer into a humanitarian with genuine compassion for the Vietnamese whose lives depended on him ... But the book’s tight narration of one man’s exploits is also its main shortcoming ... [The book] does not examine the larger saga of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who escaped Vietnam after the war or the fates of countless would-be refugees who didn’t manage to get out. Without such context, it’s hard to appreciate the scope of the tragedy that befell Vietnam.
White's persona seems like something out of a Terry Southern or Ian Fleming novel—as does his writing. White tells his inspiring story with wit, panache, humility, and a captivating sense of time and place.
