Post-Mandarin offers an engaging look at a cohort of Vietnamese intellectuals who adopted European fields of knowledge, a new Romanized alphabet, and print media—all of which were foreign and illegible to their fathers. This new generation of intellectuals established Vietnam’s modern anticolonial literature.The term “post-mandarin” illuminates how Vietnam’s deracinated figures of intellectual authority adapted to a literary field moving away from a male-to-male literary address to...

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZEONE OF THE MOST ACCLAIMED WORKS OF HISTORY IN RECENT YEARSWinner of the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians • Winner of the American Library in Paris Book Award • Winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award • Finalist for the Cundill Prize in Historical LiteratureNAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BYTh...

"Max Havelaar: Or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company" is a culturally and socially significant 1860 novel by Multatuli (the pen name of Eduard Douwes Dekker) which was to play a key role in shaping and modifying Dutch colonial policy in the Dutch East Indies in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In the novel, the protagonist, Max Havelaar, tries to battle against a corrupt government system in Java, which was a Dutch colony at the time. Eduard Douwes Dekker...

KHE SANH: Siege in the Clouds, An Oral History by Eric Hammel From critcally acclaimed military historian Eric Hammel comes a vivid oral history account of the Tet 1968 siege of the Khe Sanh Combat Base. The words of American fighting men caught up in the grueling, deadly seventy-seven-day ordeal create a harrowing tapestry of tragedy and triumph. = As two North Vietnamese Army divisions move to surround them, the vastly outnumbered U.S. Marines rush to strengthen their defenses at the isolat...

An engaging and impassioned look at Turkey's identity crisis'A brilliant literary thriller, an incursion into forbidden territory that is all the more gripping for being true' The Times'Sifting through propaganda, partisan accounts and evasive oral histories, de Bellaigue delivers a comprehensive primer in Turkish political history' Guardian_______________________________What...

In the Tet Offensive of 1968, Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces launched a massive countrywide attack on South Vietnam. Though the Communists failed to achieve their tactical and operational objectives, James Willbanks claims Hanoi won a strategic victory. The offensive proved that America's progress was grossly overstated and caused many Americans and key presidential advisors to question the wisdom of prolonging combat.Willbanks also maintains that the Communists laid siege t...

Burma is one of the largest countries in Southeast Asia and was once one of its richest. Under successive military regimes, however, the country eventually ended up as one of the poorest countries in Asia, a byword for repression and ethnic violence. Richard Cockett spent years in the region as a correspondent for The Economist and witnessed firsthand the vicious sectarian politics of the Burmese government, and later, also, its surprising attempts at political and social reform.

Through an examination of post-1997 Thai cinema and video art Arnika Fuhrmann shows how vernacular Buddhist tenets, stories, and images combine with sexual politics in figuring current struggles over notions of personhood, sexuality, and collective life. The drama, horror, heritage, and experimental art films she analyzes draw on Buddhist-informed conceptions of impermanence and prominently feature the motif of the female ghost. In these films the characters' eroticization in the spheres o...

“One could not choose a worse place for fighting the Japanese,” said Winston Churchill of North Burma, deeming it “the most forbidding fighting country imaginable.” But it was here that the fledgling Office of Strategic Services conducted its most successful combat operations of World War II. Troy Sacquety takes readers into Burma’s steaming jungles in the first book to fully cover the exploits and contributions of the OSS’s Detachment 101 against the Japanese Imperial Army.Functio...

For a Chinese immigrant in South-East Asia to make good is not unique, but what is unique in Tan Kah-kee's case is his enormous contribution to employment and economic development in Singapore and Malaya. He was the only Chinese in history to have single-handedly founded a private university in Amoy and financially maintained it for sixteen years. He was the only Hua-ch'iao of his generation to have led the Chinese in South-East Asia to help China to resist the Japanese invasion in a conce...

In the 50th anniversary year of Singapore's independence, it is timely to trace our developmental journey in order that young Singaporeans students, visiting tourists and foreigners working in Singapore may be informed about why and how Singapore succeeded, despite tremendous odds. The two volumes relate the developmental stories and secrets of Singapore, so that other developing countries can be inspired to achieve their own successes. It is a story worth telling, so that the great achiev...

A major contribution to the literature of Burmese history and politics, this book traces the rich and tragic history of the Mon people of Burma and Thailand, from the pre-colonial era to the present day. This vivid account of ethnic politics and civil war situates the story of Mon nationalism within the 'big picture' of developments in Burma, Thailand and the region. Primarily an empirical study, it also addresses issues of identity and anticipates Burmese politics in the new millennium. A...