Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
The world-renowned scholar and author of Vermeer's Hat does for China what Mary Beard did for Rome in SPQR: Timothy Brook analyzes the last eight centuries of China's relationship with the world in this magnificent history that brings together accounts from civil servants, horse traders, spiritual leaders, explorers, pirates, emperors, migrant workers, invaders, visionaries, and traitors-creating a multifaceted portrait of this highly misunderstood...
82) Home
Author
Language
English
Description
An epic saga of "families and friends entangled in the cruel snare of history" (Time magazine), Home combines political repression and exile with a spicy mixture of love, family, and food, alternating between Paris and Jakarta in the time between Suharto's 1965 rise to power and downfall in 1998, further illuminating Indonesia's tragic twentieth-century history popularized by the Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing.
Leila S. Chudori is...
Author
Language
English
Description
Prince Prisdang Chumsai (1852–1935) served as Siam's first diplomat to Europe during the most dramatic moment of Siam's political history, when its independence was threatened by European imperialism. Despite serving with patriotic zeal, he suffered irreparable social and political ruin based on rumors about fiscal corruption, sexual immorality, and political treason. In Bones around My Neck, Tamara Loos pursues the truth behind these rumors, which...
Author
Language
English
Description
A gripping account of courage, death, and survival in the war-torn islands of the Philippines.
As Japanese military strategists planned their secret offensive against the United States in 1941, they designed a simultaneous two-pronged attack to wipe out American military might in the Pacific. While American battleships blew up and sank in Pearl Harbor, Japanese bombers approached the Philippines, soon destroying both American air and naval forces...
Author
Language
English
Description
Burma is a country where, as one senior UN official puts it, "just to turn your head can mean imprisonment or death."
Aung San Suu Kyi is one of the world's foremost inspirational revolutionary leaders. Considered to be Burma's best hope for freedom, she has waged a war of steadfast nonviolent opposition to the country's vicious militant regime. Because of her resistance to the brutality of the Burmese government, she has been under house arrest...
Author
Language
English
Description
Indonesia, a nation of thousands of islands and almost 250-million people, straddles the junction of the Pacific and Indian oceans. Current President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has presided over 6 per cent average yearly growth of its economy, to surpass $1 trillion. If this rate continues, Indonesia will join the world's ten biggest economies in a decade or so, just behind the so-called BRIC countries. The much-discussed recent documentary The Act...
Author
Language
English
Description
Before El Chapo and Escobar there was Khun Sa!
Dubbed the 'Prince of Death' he rose to power in the war torn jungles of Burma and by 1990, was the world's biggest opium warlord - with a $2 million bounty on his head. But he was also a freedom fighter commanding an army of 30,000, to defend the Shan people from slavery by a brutal Myanmar regime.
In this compelling memoir, filmmaker Patrick King gives the first detailed account of Khun Sa's entire...
Author
Language
English
Description
Dana Sachs went to Hanoi when tourist visas began to be offered to Americans; she was young, hopeful, ready to immerse herself in Vietnamese culture. She moved in with a family and earned her keep by teaching English, and she soon found that it was impossible to blend into an Eastern culture without calling attention to her Americanness--particularly in a country where not long ago she would have been considered the enemy. But gradually, Vietnam turned...
Author
Language
English
Description
Featuring over 350 beautiful photographs, Chinese Houses of Southeast Asia captures the architectural heritage of a vibrant community. The multiple Chinese migrations from southeastern China to Southeast Asia have had important implications for both regions. In Southeast Asia this influence can be seen in the architecturally eclectic homes these migrants and their descendants built as they became successful; homes that combined Chinese, European and...
Author
Language
English
Description
Between 1975 and 1979, the Communist Party of Kampuchea fundamentally transformed the social, economic, political, and natural landscape of Cambodia. During this time, as many as two million Cambodians died from exposure, disease, and starvation, or were executed at the hands of the Party. The dominant interpretation of Cambodian history during this period presents the CPK as a totalitarian, communist, and autarkic regime seeking to reorganize Cambodian...
Author
Language
English
Description
This book explores the cultural landscape of Afghanistan with its rich and intricate tapestry woven with the threads of diverse tribes and ethnolinguistic groups, each contributing unique hues to the nation's vibrant mosaic. Situated at the crossroads of Central and South Asia, Afghanistan's complex geography has given rise to a mosaic of ethnicities, languages, and traditions that collectively shape the identity of this ancient land. To explore this...
Author
Language
English
Description
On June 6, 1913, George Groslier, a twenty-six year old French explorer, set out with a small group of native porters on a six-month trek in the Cambodian wilderness.
A millennium earlier, the Khmer empire had ruled the entire region. In the 15th century, however, the kingdom mysteriously collapsed, with dense jungle quickly covering its fabulous temples. The French government charged Groslier with documenting the most remote edifices of the Khmer...
Author
Language
English
Description
In May 1943, a self-described "really young, green, ignorant lieutenant" assumed command of a new US Marine Corps company. His even younger enlisted Marines were learning to use an untested weapon, the M4A2 "Sherman" medium tank. His sole combat veteran was the company bugler, who had salvaged his dress cap and battered horn from a sinking aircraft carrier. Just six months later, the company would be thrown into one of the ghastliest battles of World...
Author
Language
English
Description
The British Army's report on the Japanese invasion of Burma during WWII-based on firsthand accounts by the officers who survived it.
In 1942, the Japanese military drove British and Indian forces out of Burma. Colonel E.C.V. Foucar, M.C., was given the task of discovering what happened. Seeking information and documentary evidence from officers of the First Burma Campaign, Foucar wrote this detailed account for the Director of Military Training.
This...
Author
Language
English
Description
The Golden Triangle region that joins Burma, Thailand, and Laos is one of the global centers of opiate and methamphetamine production. Opportunistic Chinese businessmen and leaders of various armed groups are largely responsible for the manufacture of these drugs. The region is defined by the apparently conflicting parallel strands of criminality and efforts at state building, a tension embodied by a group of individuals who are simultaneously local...
Author
Language
English
Description
In the best tradition of Paul Theroux and J. Maarten Troost, comes Derek Pugh's torrid tale of Sumbawa, and his ascent of the iconic volcano Mt. Tambora, whose 1815 eruption did indeed change the world. Pugh's account of the eruption and its aftermath is masterfully done - clearly the product of much dogged research through archives, scientific journals, as well as conversations with Indonesians lasting long into the steamy night. Himself a long-time...
Author
Language
English
Description
Not many British schoolgirls have grown up to become revolutionary heroes of distant, eastern nations but Muriel Stewart Walker did just that. Under a multitude of different names – 'K'tut Tantri' and 'Surabaya Sue' being the best know – she joined in the struggle for Indonesian independence after the Second World War and broadcast its revolutionary message to the world on Rebel Radio. But she did more and smuggled arms, and probably drugs, to...
Author
Language
English
Description
Phyllis tells of her childhood experiences from five to nine years old, when she was interned as a prisoner of war of WWII in Java with her mother and brother in Japanese internment camps for women and children. It is the story of survival, courage, laced with humor, and insights of daily life in captivity. The whole family survived. Phyllis also describes how these early experiences shaped her adult life and career choices.
Author
Language
English
Description
The US journalist's account of his colleague's struggle to survive the Cambodian genocide-the basis for the Oscar–winning film The Killing Fields. On April 17, 1975, Khmer Rouge soldiers seized Phnom Penh-the capital of Cambodia-and began a brutal genocide that left millions dead. Dith Pran, a Cambodian working as an assistant to American reporter Sydney H. Schanberg, was a witness to these events. While his employer managed to escape across the...
Author
Language
English
Description
The story of British Malaya and Singapore, from the days of Victorian pioneers to the denouement of independence, is a momentous episode in Britain's colonial past. Through memoirs, letters and interviews, Margaret Shennan chronicles its halcyon years, the two World Wars, economic depression and diaspora, revealing the attitudes of the diverse quixotic characters of this now quite vanished world. The British came as fortune-seekers to exploit Asian...
Didn't find it?
Can't find what you are looking for? Try our Materials Request Service. Submit Request