(Part 2) Best southeast asia history books according to redditors
We found 189 Reddit comments discussing the best southeast asia history books. We ranked the 108 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.
34. Ghosts of War in Vietnam (Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare)
1 mention
White privilege is strong in Cambodia. By getting on a plane and moving here I jumped up the social ladder. Jobs are easier for me to get and I start at a baseline salary that's higher than an equally or more educated Khmer. For example: I just checked a job posting board here and there's graphic design jobs for Khmer that are hiring for $150 - $400/month. Any teaching job for a white person is going to start at a grand a month. Figure that rent at a decent place is no more than $300/month with utilities (that's almost exactly what I pay) and you have 700 to fuck with all month. You can easily get by on 10 bucks/day for food leaving you with $400 to spend on hookers, beer, and drugs. All of which can be very cheap.
Also, Cambodia has the highest concentration of NGOs in the world. That means that besides teachers, there's tons NGO workers that are getting paid western salaries AND a "hardship bonus" or whatever it's called because they have to live in a developing country. Not all the NGO folks get this bonus, but some do.
This place is kind of a trap if you have a lot of vices.
>it's a nation getting back on its feet after the horrors of the Khmer Rouge.
Yeah...sort of. I mean dude...I don't know how to explain this part of it.
Yeah, the country is for sure doing better than it was 30 years ago but that's not saying a lot. The government and anyone with money here has impunity. The dictator (yes dictator, he lost the last election and is still in power) that's running the country has an estimated net worth of over a billion dollars while the GDP per capita is just over $1000.
Dude just read Hun Sen's Cambodia by Sebastian Strangio. I don't understand all of the big picture issues well enough to explain them simply.
A family friend of mine wrote a book on it, you can read about it if you'd like. here is the link.
There is this whole debate of what is a Malay.
You may want to check out this book: https://www.amazon.com/Contesting-Malayness-Identity-Across-Boundaries/dp/9971698455/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1496799995&sr=8-1&keywords=Contesting+Malayness+%3A+Malay+identity+across+boundaries
Asian cities are increasingly viewed as the new frontier of both the process of urbanisation and the exciting conceptual terrain for theorisation, especially so in the growing postcolonial literature. But I always have this uneasy feeling whenever I am speaking about Asian cities collectively, because it doesn't quite make sense to me - after all, how could the biggest continent on the planet that mothered three of the oldest civilisations and currently hosting the majority of world population be easily generalised and summarised? Personally I'd prefer to have a closer look into a particular country/culture you're interested in, which would be a lot more productive given its unique historical trajectory in urban development.
My past studies focused on Chinese cities and Singapore, and there are in fact tons of books and articles about urban planning in Asia. I'm not sure if you have access to them and if you'd be interested since many are highly academical, but I'll write type down a few things in my mind right now.
Wu (2015) Planning for Growth: Urban and Regional Planning in China - this is basically an encyclopedia about urban planning in China which covered both the past and the present and is fairly easy to read. The book summarises the Chinese cities really well - you could still see ancient Chinese urban planning's legacy and influence in East Asia even in the contemporary world, e.g. Kyoto and Chang'an, the capital city of Tang Dynasty; the Soviet influence is still very much traceable in many Chinese cities nowadays. Fulong Wu was my supervisor and I can guarantee that he's an expert in the field of Chinese planning and wrote a lot about cities, development, planning, and policies in China. Give him a quick search you'd find plentiful articles about Chinese cities and planning.
Heng (2002) 50 Years Of Urban Planning In Singapore - Singapore is definitely a unique city-state, and I'd say that this collection of articles covers a wide range of aspects of urban planning in Singapore and is something highly readable. In fact, the city kinda is a giant urban laboratory nowadays. Singapore's urban planning is undoubtedly influenced by the British colonial legacy but has grown out of it. It's rare to witness so many classic urban concepts coming alive within the same city. Also, give publications from the Centre of Liveable Cities a look too if you'd like to understand more about the details. Their articles cover a range of planning research in Asia and are all free to access. They post links to their work regularly on LinkedIn. In short, Singapore has been written a lot.
Roy (2004) Urban Informality : Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia and Roy (2011) Worlding Cities : Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global Anaya Roy focused a lot on Indian cities and her work contributes a lot to postcolonial urbanism. Definitely, not the easiest to read but her perspectives are very helpful to me.
The Western vs non-Western debate is something I often have mixed feelings about. The overemphasis of the Anglophone has to be overcome, but the world does not exist in this perfect binary. And I do believe that cities, since their very birth, have never been existed in silos - they form the early networks of civilisations and influence each other a lot. The communist legacy in China, the interplay between colonial planning and modernism in India, and the evolution of urban planning in Singapore are all fascinating, so happy googling and happy reading!
For an introduction to Thai history: A History of Thailand.
For something a bit deeper - Thailand's Political History: From the 13th century to recent times.
If your friend wants scholarly books on Malaysian political and economical history, you can recommend most books by Prof Dr Edmund Terence Gomez, UM Economics Professor. Some of his books:
Amazon & Goodreads
For culture of Malaysia, I'm sure most travel books on South East-Asia covers this very well.
Anyway, most of the books on Malaysian politics and history tend to be biased towards writers' views. Books like Telling It Straight from Marina Mahathir cover certain aspects of Malaysia that you mentioned above.
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Have a look at François Bizot's The Gate also
I can't recall if he ever wrote anything specifically on just Vietnam, but his "After Cataclysm" deals entirely with the Indochina war. In it Chomsky and Edward S. Herman write about Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia as well as the imperial U.S. policy towards them before and after the war. This was also written in a period where Chomsky had much more energy in him, making it one of his better works.
I recommend Noam Chirpsky
And this
For free overview the wiki and wikivoyage articles should be good enough to print and bring along:
For books try these since they have kindle versions (note: I haven't read them):
For Indonesian travel on a wider perspective I can recommend this:
Also while in Jogja have a visit to the Ullen Sentalu museum too.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Nam-Vietnam-Words-Fought-Abacus/dp/0349102392
This book blew everything that could be considered information processing material right out of me.
This is on the cover of one of my all-time favourite books: Nam: The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women Who Fought There. Basically its an oral history of the war.
These two are quite interesting:
https://www.amazon.com/Its-Living-Work-Vietnam-Today/dp/9971696983
https://www.amazon.com/Vietnam-Rising-Dragon-Bill-Hayton/dp/030017814X
Working life/attitudes and economic growth actually tell you a lot about a country.
Also here's a long list of recommended books. Quite a few of them aren't war books.
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/8440.Best_Books_on_Vietnam
Thanks for the reply!
I'd like some more elaboration on the differences between Turse's and Greiner's books; looking at the Amazon summary, it seems like Greiner also argues that it is not so much the fault of the "grunts" on the ground, but the faults of the general US strategy in the area, and the approach that the top brass took toward Vietnam:
>Rather than pointing the finger at the “grunts” fighting a dirty war on the ground, Greiner argues that the responsibility for these atrocities extends all the way up to the White House and the Pentagon. The escalation of violence on the ground can be attributed to several factors: a U.S. political leadership afraid for the United States to lose its credibility and unable, against better advice, to stop the war; a military that devised a strategy of attrition based on “body counts” as the only way to defeat an enemy skilled in unconventional warfare; officers who were badly trained, lacking in motivation and interested only in furthering their careers; soldiers who realized they were utterly disposable and sought to empower themselves through random killing. The result was the torture, rape, maiming, and murder of countless Vietnamese civilians.
This doesn't seem all that different from Turse's identification of official policy as the root cause of the violence. Does the book focus more on "brainwashing" methodologies than Greiner's book?
In that post /u/Bernardito recommends "War Without Fronts: The USA in Vietnam", who was described as:
> Rather than pointing the finger at the "grunts" fighting a dirty war on the ground, Greiner argues that the responsibility for these atrocities extends all the way up to the White House and the Pentagon. The escalation of violence on the ground can be attributed to several factors: a U.S. political leadership afraid for the United States to lose its credibility and unable, against better advice, to stop the war; a military that devised a strategy of attrition based on "body counts" as the only way to defeat an enemy skilled in unconventional warfare; officers who were badly trained, lacking in motivation and interested only in furthering their careers; soldiers who realized they were utterly disposable and sought to empower themselves through random killing. The result was the torture, rape, maiming, and murder of countless Vietnamese civilians.
... so saying that he's "whitewashing the US military" is a bit of a stretch. He's just saying that book isn't that great, and recommended a better one.
> In 1971, on a routine outing through the Cambodian countryside, the young French ethnologist Francois Bizot is captured by the Khmer Rouge. Accused of being an agent of 'American imperialism', he is chained and imprisoned. His captor, Douch - later responsible for tens of thousands of deaths - interrogates him at length; after three months of torturous deliberation, during which his every word was weighed and his life hung in the balance, he was released. Four years later, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh. Francois Bizot became the official intermediary between the ruthless conqueror and the terrified refugees behind the gate of the French embassy: a ringside seat to one of history's most appalling genocides. Written thirty years later, Francois Bizot's memoir of his horrific experiences in the 'killing fields' of Cambodia is, in the words of John le Carre, a 'contemporary classic'.
Here are all the local Amazon links I could find:
amazon.co.uk
amazon.ca
amazon.com.au
amazon.in
amazon.com.mx
amazon.de
amazon.it
amazon.es
amazon.com.br
amazon.nl
amazon.co.jp
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That's awesome, people learning their family's language is always kind of heartwarming :)
BTW, unrelated to languages, but this is a really good book on Cambodia if you're interested:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00O56PUB4/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
I left Singapore in 2006. Mr. Baker graduated SAS in 1955, taught in American School of Beirut, American School of Tehran, ISKL, and finally went back to teaching at SAS until his retirement a few years ago. Now he lives in Penang. He's the author of a book on Singapore-American relations over the years called The Eagle in the Lion City.
The person in questions' mother was a Eurasian whose grandmother was a Hawaiian of Japanese descent. The father's reaction was, approximately, "wtf," followed by a very awkward conversation about Grandma Yoko.
Edit, Mr. Baker's books:
The Eagle in the Lion City: America, Americans and Singapore https://www.amazon.com/dp/9814189049/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_MyfJDb885DB8Y
Crossroads: A Popular History of Malaysia and Singapore https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BARLF38/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_LxfJDbK869CQ4
Almost anything by Bernard B. Fall.
Street Without Joy for a history of the French involvement
https://www.amazon.com/Street-Without-Joy-Indochina-Stackpole-ebook/dp/B001GIPFD2/ref=la_B000APUSOI_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1505155856&sr=1-1
Hell in a Very Small Place for Dien Bien Phu
https://www.amazon.com/Hell-Very-Small-Place-Siege/dp/030681157X/ref=la_B000APUSOI_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1505155856&sr=1-2
The Two Viet-Nams for the politicals
https://www.amazon.com/Viet-Nams-Political-Military-Analysis-Revised/dp/B000IVEVDS/ref=la_B000APUSOI_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1505155856&sr=1-5
Last Reflections on a War -- If memory serves, he actually had at least one interview with Ho Chi Minh in that one.
https://www.amazon.com/Last-Reflections-War-Bernard-Fall-ebook/dp/B005JYXU1S/ref=la_B000APUSOI_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1505155856&sr=1-4
I'll be happy to answer this,
the Spirit world has a noetic quality .
the Spirit world is a fundamental part of society. Ignoring the spirit world is akin to desacralizing it
William James said,
"Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discurssive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority"
Ghosts of War in Vietnam :Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare by Heonik Kwon
a review,
"The voices of Americans lost, dead, maimed physically or psychologically, fill the bookshelves. For the most part the voices of Vietnamese, living or dead, are unavailable. In his powerfully moving and beautifully written book, 'The Ghosts of War in Vietnam,' Heonik Kwon enables those voices to be heard. The ghosts of Vietnam's wars are not metaphorical but vital presences through which Vietnamese understand their recent history, reflect on all that has happened since and attempt to resolve the contradictions of the present. These are ghost stories that will haunt you. No other book I have read about contemporary Vietnam so thoroughly, painfully, and intelligently illuminates both the country's past and present. Ghost of Vietnam is an indispensable book."
This book should be more widely read: A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and the Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam .
Vietnam was not a war of attrition, unwinnable, or inevitable. Vietnam was in many ways a classic limited war. The TL;DR is, the US has a limited supply of public support for the war, just like all wars in US history, including WWII. Go beyond the amount of public support you have and the public demands you go home. Specific failures on the part of US generalship squandered a great deal of this limited support, and by the time the military had finalized a strategy to win, political support to continue to support the South had dried up and the South was left to lose, although it did not have to be so.
>White privilege is strong in Cambodia. By getting on a plane and moving here I jumped up the social ladder. Jobs are easier for me to get and I start at a baseline salary that's higher than an equally or more educated Khmer. For example: I just checked a job posting board here and there's graphic design jobs for Khmer that are hiring for $150 - $400/month. Any teaching job for a white person is going to start at a grand a month. Figure that rent at a decent place is no more than $300/month with utilities (that's almost exactly what I pay) and you have 700 to fuck with all month. You can easily get by on 10 bucks/day for food leaving you with $400 to spend on hookers, beer, and drugs. All of which can be very cheap.
>Also, Cambodia has the highest concentration of NGOs in the world. That means that besides teachers, there's tons NGO workers that are getting paid western salaries AND a "hardship bonus" or whatever it's called because they have to live in a developing country. Not all the NGO folks get this bonus, but some do.
>This place is kind of a trap if you have a lot of vices.
>>it's a nation getting back on its feet after the horrors of the Khmer Rouge.
>Yeah...sort of. I mean dude...I don't know how to explain this part of it.
>Yeah, the country is for sure doing better than it was 30 years ago but that's not saying a lot. The government and anyone with money here has impunity. The dictator (yes dictator, he lost the last election and is still in power) that's running the country has an estimated net worth of over a billion dollars while the GDP per capita is just over $1000.
>Dude just read Hun Sen's Cambodia by Sebastian Strangio. I don't understand all of the big picture issues well enough to explain them simply.
Defo picking this up
This is very hard for me to compute.
Japan's conduct during WWII was terrible (in China, Korea, Philippines, etc) - reading the book Tears in the Darkness will give you an idea - and the worse thing is they haven't acknowledged their actions at all (at least not enough, in words, in the classes they teach the new generation, in reparations) - and then I read about Sugihara...
The cynic in me however thinks, that this is simply an extension of a Japanese man being able to emphatize more with Western/European people (they don't want to be classified as Asians, or more likely, they want to be identified as "white"), hence Sugihara's actions - because I've never heard or learned of them doing something similar in/with Asians (at least during or before WWII)