Laos: Caught in the Web
The Vietnam War Years
Book review by Burl Burlingame (The Honolulu Star Bulletin, 12 December 2004)

Rantala and her husband were USAID workers with stars in their eyes when they settled in a quiet, tiny Lao village in 1971. They became friends with a Laotian family, and as the swirling chaos of war spilled over from Vietnam they witnessed the country they loved dissolve before their eyes.
   Rantala's memoir-begun as a kind of self-therapy after her husband died-is told with aching sympathy for the people of Laos and clear insight about the hammer and anvil of war, and joins the must-reads about that fading corner of history.

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