Peter Zinoman's book on prisons in late colonial French Indochina is a valuable contribution to prison history and modern Vietnamese history. This work not only demystifies the nature of colonial prisons and the lives of prisoners, but also historicizes their role in developing a new political consciousness in broader Vietnamese society. Furthermore, he managed to make his narrative stably coherent while dealing with various types of source materials, including administrative reports, inspection records, newspapers, diaries, and a huge amount of prison memoirs. This makes this work historically grounded, plus its strength comes from the readable writing style. In the first chapters Zinoman clarifies his projects in relation to previous academic works on the history of prisons: first, the author takes up Michelle Perrot's call for research into the daily lives of prisoners, and critically examines Michelle Foucault and his followers who they neglect this effort and their concern "with the strategies and discourses of institutional domination": (p. 98) Second, moving away from the Foucauldian understanding of prison as a site of transformation and enlightenment of prisoners through continuous surveillance, discipline, punishment and total cure, the author states that the prisons of French Indochina were of a completely different nature: the colonial prisons originated more directly from the pre-existing The Sino-Vietnamese tradition of prison institutions and repressive prison camps rather than “modern French disciplinary prisons”. (p. 14 - 16) The author implies that the repressive and brutal characteristics and the lack of modern disciplinary ideals in the middle of paper ......and statistics are not convincing on some occasions. For example, when he insists on the “extraordinary level of positivity in colonial Indochina,” he cites only rates from Japan, Dutch East India, and France from different years. Furthermore, colonial Indochina's incarceration rate in 1936, by today's standards, is mediocre: it is about one-seventh the rate of the United States in 2013. The incarceration rate should have been used, perhaps, to explain the local context. of increase/decrease in the prison population. Even with these minor problems, this book is still worth reading for people interested in prison studies, Vietnamese history, rebellions, communism, and nationalism. Works Cited Peter Zinoman, “The Colonial Bastille: A History of Captivity in Vietnam, 1862-1940” University of California Press, 2001