The Girl from the Coast by Pramoedya Ananta Toer (Hyperion Books)

She was small and beautiful and only fourteen when she was taken from her seaside village in Java. Carried in the unfamiliar luxury of a carriage, wearing gold and clothes more elaborate than she had ever known before, she was given in marriage to an aristocrat in the city, a man powerful enough that he had no need to rouse himself from his afternoon nap to witness his new bride's arrival. So young that she had not yet begun her monthly cycles, married to a dagger that had represented her husband during the wedding ceremony, the girl was still a child, a fisherman's daughter who had been happy while living among wind, waves and boats and unaware that she was poor until the day that she was enveloped in wealth.

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Bathed in perfume-scented water, adorned with rouge and kohl, in a house where her handmaiden is her only companion and her husband is a stern, soft-handed stranger, the girl becomes a stranger to herself, without a name and without an occupation. Her face is no longer her own, and her life is so truncated that she has no appetite for the food that is plentiful and delicious. Her freedom goes no farther than the garden wall that encloses the house she lives in, and she has lost the ability to give, since nothing that has been presented to her is truly hers. She is taught to recite the Koran by rote without understanding the words she recites, she learns to bake cakes, embroider, turn white cloth into batik. Her hands lose their roughness and her skin turns pale; her wishes are immediately granted by her servants but the girl knows the only real power rests with her husband. She understands that her presence in his house has no more significance than a chair or a mattress; she too is her husband's property. Her life, she realizes, will change only when she becomes a mother, and it does, in ways that she could never have imagined.

Her story has the magic of a fairytale and the power and resonance of a fable, yet it is true. It is one of the world's great writers' tribute to his grandmother, and to the strength and resilience of women who own nothing but their own characters. Imprisoned for his political beliefs for more than seventeen years, Pramoedya Ananta Toer wrote over thirty books and would have accomplished even more, were it not that some were destroyed by the Indonesian military. Among the books that were lost were the two volumes that would have turned this book into a trilogy tracing the history of Toer's family.

Standing alone, this is still a masterpiece. Through the story of an unnamed girl, Toer intertwines true facts with magic realism and offers up a whole world--of large injustices and small triumphs, of the value provided by closely knit communities and the loneliness that can come with affluence, and of the power of stories to keep spirits alive. This is a splendid introduction to a breathtaking body of work as well as a book that would have gained Toer acclaim if it had been the only one that he ever wrote.

The Fragile Edge by Julia Whitty (Houghton Mifflin)



In a world where any of us can go anywhere for the price of a plane ticket, there is one frontier that is for the most part unexplored and uninhabited by human beings. It is a place filled with blazing colors, and sounds that seem to come from our deepest dreams, and intricate social structures. Only a handful of people have ever ventured to it--one of them, fortunately for those who love to read, is Julia Whitty, who has been to the depths of the Pacific Ocean and describes what she found there in words so vivid that no photographs are necessary.

The world of water is a world without our language and one that exists largely outside of our senses, Whitty explains. Underwater, humans have no words. "We smell nothing underwater (although the sea is filled with scents), taste only the metallic tang of compressed air, see poorly, and are reduced to nondirectional hearing; in effect we're disabled." What people experience in the depths of the sea "tends to be felt, rather than accurately remembered."

The coral reefs of the South Pacific atolls provide the aquatic communities that Whitty shows her readers. The water is filled with dusky damselfish, "small strangely pugnacious gray fish," who serve as guardians of the coral by aggressively protecting their gardens of algae that grow upon the reefs. Tiny fish minister to larger ones in "cleaning stations," eating fragments of food found between predatory teeth or debriding the flesh of wounded fish, who wait in queues for the cleaner's attentions. Human divers who approach the cleaners "quietly, holding out some battered part" can also receive their services, which Whitty describes as "nibbles as tender as kisses." Plants that measure the tiniest fraction of an inch, glistening with bioluminescence, illuminate the fish that eat them and turn waves into "incandescent waterfalls of radiance."

This is a world where a moray eel can become a diver's familiar escort, where baby reef sharks are so appealing that people who know better are tempted beyond their strength to cuddle them like infants, and where the song of a distant humpback whale, Whitty says, is "less a sound than an itchy vibration in my bones and teeth." While "humans live by light," the ocean world is one that is ruled by sound, emitting a perpetual low hum that scientists believe could be the sound of storm energy that is converted to seismic waves, becoming "the conversation between the sea and the sky."

Bangkok Blondes by The Bangkok Women's Writers Group (Bangkok Book House)

Sporting heavily bleached hair extensions that were once silky, black strands on a Thai girl's head, learning how to rid an apartment of its resident ghost, finding a future husband at a market stall, eating lunch on Christmas Day with murderers and drug dealers--welcome to the world of the Bangkok Blondes.

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They're not exclusively blondes, these articulate women who live in Bangkok, and they are definitely not the chick-lit purveyors that the title and cover of this anthology might imply. They are writers who give a multi-faceted and unstereotypical view of a city that they all know well.

For decades, books about Bangkok have been dominated by the perspective of the Barstool Buddhists, those old Bangkok hands who, to a man, have suffered at the soft and gentle hands of Thai girls and have lived to tell, and retell, the tale. (Notable exceptions to this school of writing are Colin Cotterill and Jim Eckardt, authors who have gone beyond the bar scene with praiseworthy literary results.) For a woman's take on Thailand's capital city, readers could choose either Carol Hollinger's classic Mai Pen Rai (Means Never Mind) or Karen Connelly's classic Touch the Dragon (published in the U.S. as Dream of a Thousand Lives). And that was all she wrote--until the Bangkok Women's Writers Group came along.

A collection of personal essays and fiction with a smattering of poetry, Bangkok Blondes provides an honest, idiosyncratic view of the eastern hemisphere's City of Angels. Jess Tansutat, the volume's sole Thai contributor says in her outstanding essay, The Butterfly Game, "For me, the "city of angels" seems to have just too many angels." She handles the difficulty of dating in Bangkok with objectivity, wisdom, and humor, and then the book moves on--no whining, no sniveling--to other facets of Bangkok life.

Pursuing fitness, braving the language barrier in a hair salon, working as an extra on a television commercial, making it past cultural hurdles with Thai boyfriends are stories that are fun to read but aren't unexpected topics. Examining Thai culture while driving in a city that has taken the traffic jam to an art form, playing the Bangkok version of Russian Roulette by riding side-saddle on the back of a motorcycle taxi, living with a statue of the Buddha that's taken on a disconcerting life of its own, undergoing colonic therapy, braving the wild confusion of Romanized Thai and English that has been thoroughly reinvented: these are all things that could only be written by people with open minds and hearts who have willingly submitted to another culture, and that make this collection one to seek out and read.

The pure joy of a book like Bangkok Blondes is discovering new voices. The frustration of it is longing for more from particular voices--Martha Scherzer, Chloe Trindall, Jess Tansutat, Zoe Popham are all writers who should be working on their very own books. But this is only one opinion. Every reader of Bangkok Blondes will discover her own favorite writer--like a box of good chocolates, this book has a wide variety of choices and something for every taste.

Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra (HarperCollins)

Nobody knows why Ganesh Gaitonde, a man who controls at least half of the underworld in Bombay, would choose to give himself up to a lowly police inspector like Sartaj Singh--least of all Sartaj himself. Nobody knows why Gaitonde has sequestered himself in a concrete building that resembles a cube, why he tells Sartaj the story of his criminal beginnings while the police lay siege to the bunker, and why the body of a woman lies beside Gaitonde's corpse when Sartaj reaches the heart of the stronghold. And nobody knows why agents from India's foreign intelligence agency, RAW, take charge of the post-mortem scene and order Sartaj to ferret out the details that will explain the inexplicable.

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Sartaj, a man who was once chosen by a women's magazine as one of "The City's Best-Looking Bachelors," is in the throes of a full-blown midlife crisis, "past forty, a divorced police inspector with middling professional prospects…just pedaling along, doing his job." He's lost his youthful belief that he could "hold the whole city in his heart." When he begins to investigate the life and death of one of the most powerful men in India, his own life starts to expand as he uncovers other people's secrets.

Bombay is a city filled with people who have moved there to recreate themselves, and secrets are perhaps its most valuable currency, upon which power rests. Everyone—the beautiful movie star whose photographs fuel magazine sales, the woman who was Gaitonde's best friend for years without ever meeting him face-to-face, Sartaj's professional mentor who has known him since childhood, Sartaj's mother—has an untold history that forms the base of their visible lives.

As Sartaj explores the mysteries that surround the death of Gaitonde, he is led deep into the heart of Bombay, into his own heart, and into a world beyond, where corruption and greed can lead to annihilation. The mythic life of Gaitonde becomes smaller and more human, while other forces stretch beyond India's borders, and the terror of 9/11 presages the end of the Kaliyug period.

While Sartaj's investigation takes shape, so does the city that he lives in. Vikram Chandra has a Dickensian skill for bringing life to a multitude of characters who at first seem to be a random cluster, but who fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. When all of their stories fall into place, piece by piece Bombay is brought into being—its dark corners, its blaze of vitality, "the jammed jumble of cars, and the thickets of slums, and the long loops of rails, and the swarms of people, and the radio music in the bazaars." This book is far more than a subcontintental version of The Godfather, or the middle-aged love story of Sartaj, a wounded romantic who learns that "to be rescued from one’s foolishness was the greatest tenderness." It’s a portrait of Bombay, of Mumbai, and to read it is to "hold the whole city" in your hands and perhaps in your heart.

Smile When You're Lying by Chuck Thompson (Holt Paperback)

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I love to travel, I love to eat, and I love reading magazines. Staring at the passing landscape from a comfortable train seat and contemplating my next meal, with a small stack of glossy magazines close at hand, is what I hope awaits me after death if I behave myself in this life. Obviously I must be an indefatigable fan of those magazines that are devoted to food or travel, right?

Wrong. Heaven knows I’ve tried to read them. I’ve even bought a few, seduced by their glorious photographs, but every time I’ve gotten past the images, my eyes glaze over, my brain becomes paralyzed from the non-stop barrage of adjectives, and I begin to long for something else to read-- perhaps the back of a cereal box or the label on a bottle of aspirin.

If this sounds a trifle harsh, let me assure you it is mild compared to the blazingly funny critique of travel writing offered by Chuck Thompson, a man who has made his living for years writing for and about "the world’s second-largest commercial enterprise." He’s also a writer who has left most of his best stories unwritten, to be told only in the presence of alcohol and in the company of good friends—until now.

A boy from Juneau, Alaska, Thompson grew up surrounded by the tourist industry and its over-used superlatives. It doesn’t take too many encounters with phrases like "spectacular glaciers" and "the charm of the Gold Rush" or one or two cruise ships filled with souvenir-buyers to turn any lad into a cynic and a traveler who knows that whatever is being touted should probably be ignored, whether it’s described by a glossy brochure or Lonely Planet.

Chuck Thompson is all that and a fine writer too. He opens his book with what promises to be just another story about a Bangkok blowjob bar that is going to substitute one set of clichés for a cluster that is equally time-worn but oh so edgy, and then makes it completely original and entirely his own with his closing sentence. And right from that beginning, when they are whisked away from the perils of reading a watered-down William Vollmann, readers know that they are in for a good time—because the author certainly is.

Thompson is a force to be argued with, and there are going to be many moments when his readers long to do that. Freed from the advertorial school of magazine writing, he never loses an opportunity to voice an opinion or to describe an encounter that’s just a wee bit on the seamy side and guaranteed to make the most politically correct choke on their decaf soymilk lattes while laughing. "It’s a shame," he admits, "but the fact stands that potential sodomy is more entertaining than clement weather, reliable public services, and obedient citizenry." Yup, that it is, when it’s a story told by someone who knows how to tell it, as is the one about writing a letter for an aging lady of dubious virtue on an idyllic Thai island or another that explains why a Japanese friend was nicknamed "Firehose."

Although it’s quite possible that he may not live to write a follow-up, because if Paul Theroux hasn’t put out a contract on him, certainly Lonely Planet will, Chuck Thompson has created a whole new spectrum of travel writing and a book that you can give to everyone on your holiday gift list—or at least for all who already have been endowed with a sense of humor.

Travels in the East by Donald Richie (Stone Bridge Press)

If you are an independent traveler who relishes solitude yet occasionally wishes for another person's voice and vision, you need to pop this tiny volume into your luggage. Donald Richie's newest book is the perfect accompaniment to any journey, whether it's still in the planning stages, is already on the open road, or will never go beyond the expanses of a cozy armchair.

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A man who left the United States to live most of his life in Japan, Richie is well aware of the privileges and limitations that come with spending short periods of time in other countries. Travel, he points out, "is freedom from captivity." Yet when travelers are in places where they cannot speak the language, it also can turn them into "no one at all."

This liability of being no one brings its own form of liberation. Without the demands of customary human interaction, travelers can become cameras, having no responsibilities except to absorb, consider, and record everything they have come to see. And that is where the challenge lies--suddenly the world is transformed into a blur of beauty and amazement. Describing it turns into a vocabulary test. Travel journals, despite the best of intentions, run the risk of becoming repositories for those desperate sentences that are usually found on the backs of postcards--unless the writer is Donald Richie.

This man doesn't leave his knowledge and experience at home when he goes exploring, and he never fails to bring originality of perspective and of language to the places that he visits. Pointing out that there is a vast difference between visiting a destination that's so far along the road less traveled that it is rarely ever heard of, and going somewhere so famous that a visitor has a connection with it long before actually being there, Richie revels in experiencing the places he goes to, and then recreating that experience for his readers. For him, viewing the Great Pyramids or the splendors of Cambodia's temples is an adventure as fresh and untarnished as going to Bhutan or Mongolia.

In Egypt, "in the cold shadow of Cheops" on the Geza plateau, he finds a profile from an ancient bas-relief on the face of the camel driver who is his guide, and a direct line is drawn from the present to the past and its men who built pyramids from stones "as big as a Toyota." At Angkor, while trying to understand the extent of the entire area, he realizes it is roughly the same size as inner Washington D.C. Suddenly he imagines the ruins of that modern capital being toured in the same way that Angkor is now, by tourists wandering through it in a daze of awe and ignorance. In India he sees the future of the world, "when further billions are born and have nowhere to go," and then recognizes in the erotic temple carvings of Khajuraho that sheer joy of "this beautiful, irresistible urge" that will soon overcrowd the planet.

As well as examining destinations, Richie takes a close look at the act of travel, and at those who pursue it. "Why," he asks himself while lying on an idyllic Krabi beach, "are tourists so horny?" He decides that for people who are in "a new environment, cut from the past and plunked into an alien present," often without language and the power that it confers, sex helps to reestablish a "sense of self." While his readers may or may not agree with him, he certainly does give everyone something to ponder.

As he does when recounting a conversation in Japan about the art of using lacquer, where he is told by "a portly gentleman" that there is no more lacquer because it can't be made by robots. "They're all around--young robots. They can't read anything but comic books and they perm their hair and they can't think. Robots already--that's what they are." And then, Richie says, "we drink our tea in that agreeable silence left when undoubted truths have been voiced."

May we all have the pleasure of drinking our own tea, or beer, or Scotch in that agreeable silence that comes when traveling with Donald Richie.~Janet Brown

Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace (Knopf)

It is the world after the Apocalypse, bombed, burned-out and ravenous. People starve while lice feast on their skin and in their hair. Lured by the promise of food, young women follow men they have never seen before, and little boys play at being soldiers, joined by little girls who play at being streetwalkers. The smell of death is well known; it's the stench of rotten apricots. Nothing makes sense and no one is who they appear to be. The Victors are the only people who are not locked in a nightmare, and criminals are the rulers of the marketplace. The war is over and this is Tokyo in 1946.

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In this broken city, corpses are not unusual and people are haunted by death. Black scorched concrete and the charred remnants of houses stand as memorials to the thousands of people who died in barrages of firebombs, while the noise of jackhammers working to rebuild what was destroyed punctuates every other activity. For Detective Minami, a Tokyo policeman, the dead from the past are so real to him that only sedatives will allow him to sleep. He’s a man whose life is almost robotic. He works, he brings food to his family, he makes quick visits to a woman who, he says "haunts me."

"I am one of the survivors," he tells himself bitterly and repeatedly, "one of the lucky ones."

The bodies of young women who were raped and strangled are found in a city park, and the police begin the task of discovering their identities and finding their killer. Minami becomes immersed in a hell that is composed of his war memories and of the terrible truths that he is forced to learn by doing his job—finding a murderer whose past he shares.

And we join him there. This is not a novel that leaves the reader unmoved and unscathed. Through Minami, we become inhabited by the world that he roams through. His repeated phrases begin to drive us as crazy as his body lice drive him. His hunger becomes ours and we feel the bile that he persistently vomits rising in our own throats.

David Peace uses the cadence of rock and roll and the onomatopoeic language usually associated with comic strips to carry us deeply into this book, along with words that are so piercing that it often feels as though he is writing in a whole new language. His artistry and his storytelling hold us captive in a landscape that we would prefer not to see, and yet his skill makes it impossible for us to turn away.

Once in every couple of decades, just when fiction seems as though it is really and truly dead, along comes a book that turns upside down and inside out everything that we think we know about storytelling. Like On the Road, Catch 22, or All the Pretty Horses, Tokyo Year Zero redefines what a novel can be, and what a novel can do. Read it.~Janet Brown

Running In the Family by Michael Ondaatje (Vintage Books)

"It was a new winter and I was already dreaming of Asia." With a dozen crisp words, Michael Ondaatje goes to the core of what it is to live in a cold country while yearning to return to a world of color and light. Born in Sri Lanka and irrevocably shaped by it, Ondaatje gives voice to what many people feel and are unable to articulate. With memories, vivid descriptions and poetry, he catches the shimmer and fragrance of a place that he loves and then gives it to those who struggle to do the same, and fail.

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Ondaatje's family is so rooted in Sri Lanka that "everyone was related and had Sinhalese, Tamil, Dutch, British and Burgher blood in them going back many generations." "God alone knows, your Excellency," was the reply given to a British governor who asked one of them his nationality.

These are people whose stories fill an island, whose names are chiseled in the stone of a church built in 1650, whose exploits still linger in houses first inhabited in 1700, and who continue to tell about the remarkable end of an ancestor who was "savaged to pieces by his own horse."

"There are so many ghosts here," Ondaatje says and then brilliantly brings them back to life: his grandmother "who died in the blue arms of a jacaranda tree," his parents who whirled through the 1920s in a dazzling chaos of cocktails, dancing, and gambling, a forebear who kept biological notebooks cataloging "at least fifty-five species of poison" that could be found in this island paradise, including "ground blue peacock stones."

Sri Lanka was the breeding ground for these beautiful, reckless and mythic people; it claimed them and held them in the same way that it claims and holds this book. A country with "eighteen ways of describing the smell of a durian," where a monitor lizard's tongue, cut in half and swallowed whole, will give the child who eats it the gift of brilliant speech, if it doesn't kill him first, Sri Lanka is, Ondaatje says, "a place so rich that I had to select senses" while observing it.

Through his eyes and voice comes the scent of cinnamon, rich on the skin of the wife of the man who peels it for a living, the darkness of a jungle "suddenly alive with disturbed peacocks," the shadowed figures of men standing by the side of a road, "urinating into darkness and mysterious foliage," the warmth and the smell and the feel of "slow air pinned down by rain."

"We own the country we grow up in," he tells us, while offering the one he owns to us, so generously that we can feel it in our skin and so vividly that whatever part of Asia that might inhabit our memories is suddenly alive in every one of our skin cells. Throughout the coldest winter, this book will bring the gift of heat, of flowers that "flourish and die within a month" and are instantly replaced by more, of "the lovely swallowing of thick night air" and the dreams that it carries. It's a gift wholeheartedly given by a man who can evoke a world and make it breathe forever with his wondrous and lovely words.~Janet Brown

The Father of All Things by Tom Bissell (Pantheon)

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Images and memories usually emerge in a tangled coil when Americans remember the Vietnam War. It's a time that refuses to take on the detachment that comes with becoming part of past history, remaining so unexamined and raw that it still haunts two nations. For many in the United States, the demand of "Peace now" that echoed through the 60s remains unfulfilled, and the issues that divided the country then continue to gape, unbridged, decades after the war came to an end.

Tom Bissell's family history, like that of many children born in the 70s, was intertwined with this war. His father was changed by it, his parents' marriage was destroyed by it, and Bissell grew up with Vietnam on his mind, struggling to learn about his father's time there.

Given the chance to travel to Vietnam with his father, Bissell finds that his carefully acquired abstract facts find a kind of uneasy alliance with the visceral recollections that the country pulls from ex-Marine Captain John Bissell. Skillfully blending military history with his father's memories, Bissell provides a picture of Vietnam, both in the past and during the present, that is harrowing, beautiful and at times surprisingly funny. (This is a family vacation after all, as well as an excavation of a soldier's past, and Bissell is an adult child with snake phobia.)

He shows the war from both sides, giving equal respect to U.S. and Vietnamese soldiers, without glossing over the horrors that were forced upon men and changed them forever. John Bissell, a man known to his fellow-soldiers as "Nice Guy," finds himself killing women who are shooting at him with Kalashnikovs in battle. "War is its own country," Bissell reminds us, "and creates its own citizens."

This is a book that offers no easy answers in its discussion of this particular war and the lessons that it carries over to the present day. Bissell's retelling of how the U.S. removed itself from Vietnam is stark, brutal, and essential for America to remember as it contemplates a withdrawal from Iraq. The memories that his father dredges up are pieces of truth that need to be kept in mind as military personnel return home from the Middle East.

"One of the books I read says that World War II taught its generation that the world is dark but essentially just. Vietnam taught its generation that the world is absurd," Tom Bissell tells his father.

"That's horseshit," his father replies in their continuing argumentative discussion that proves to be honest, loving, and illuminating.

The lessons of the Vietnam War have yet to be fully discussed, but these two men provide a fine example of how to begin, how to listen, and how to come to an internal and personal peace.~Janet Brown

Asian Godfathers by Joe Studwell (Atlantic Monthly Press)

You can't judge a book by its cover, or in this case by its title either. Anyone who fails to keep that tired old truism in mind when buying Joe Studwell's latest is in for a very big surprise. This book is not a rollicking romp through the Asian underworld, or the sort of glossy, glitzy true crime extravaganza that poses as investigative journalism. After all, Mr. Studwell writes for the Economist, not for Vanity Fair, and he admits that his title "is more than a little tongue-in-cheek."

Tycoons is the correct term for these "colourful, obscenely rich and interesting people" who dominate the economic turf of Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia. Governments come and go, underworld figures rise and are deposed, but the tycoons continue to flourish. Not even the economic meltdown of the late 90s significantly diminished their fortunes. Instead many of them became even more wealthy during that financial bloodbath.

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Immigration and colonialism were the groundwork from which these fortunes came. The large influx of Chinese, Arabs, Persians, and Indians provided a hungry and willing labor force for colonial powers, eventually becoming "economic entrepreneurs," while the local aristocracy were used to govern the native population, becoming "political entrepreneurs." Long after the disappearance of colonialism, these divisions still remain in place.

Mr. Studwell makes it clear that the wealth of the tycoons is based upon monopolies, cartels, and perhaps most of all, a hardworking and frugal labor force who are encouraged, if not forced, to use saving accounts. Banks in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, with their huge pool of "excessive savers," are ready sources of investment capital and "money makes more money."

Putting much of the blame for the Asian financial crisis upon the tycoons and their freewheeling financial practices, this book bristles with fierce economic facts that will deter many a casual reader. Those who persist will be horrified by the rapidity with which a region's economic structure can be reduced to rubble, and may wonder not if, but when, their own financial security will be devoured by shortsighted greed.

In the midst of all of the history and the economic gloom and the politics that are straightforwardly corrupt, the tycoons, the "godfathers," prevail through the book with the same resilience and charisma that sustain them in life. Chin Sophonpanich, the Thai creator of one of Southeast Asia's leading banks, is remembered by another financial leader as "absolutely charming—he had about six mistresses." Li Ka-shing, number ten on the 2006 Forbes list of the world's richest men, responded to the kidnapping of his son by withdrawing one billion Hong Kong dollars in cash, so huge a sum that the kidnapper couldn't fit it all into his car and had to make two trips to carry it away. An unnamed tycoon, whose son was sent a box of chocolates by a business rival, told his offspring to feed a piece to his dog, and if that wasn't fatal, "try one on his wife."

Although Mr. Studwell concludes with the confession that he used the "godfathers" as a "structural sleight" to convey a larger history, ultimately they take possession of his book with the same ease and expertise that they would absorb any encroachment on their territory. And why not? It all belongs to them.~Janet Brown

China To Me by Emily Hahn (out of print in the United States)

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Emily Hahn was brilliant, beautiful and shameless. Arriving in Shanghai in 1935, she rapidly scandalized the city's community of Westerners by taking up a Chinese lover, an addiction to opium and a gibbon named Mr. Mills, who was her constant escort. (She was once enraged by a dinner party invitation that ended with "Regret we cannot extend the invitation to Mr. Mills.") Later, when Emily announced that she and Charles Boxer, a married British army officer, were going to have a child, an American dowager's huffy response was, "Some women will stop at nothing to bring discredit to our nation."

Although her personal life makes dazzling reading, if that were all there was to Emily Hahn, it would be easy to dismiss her as a precursor to Bridget Jones. Emily, however, was no literary bimbo. She was a talented and professional writer who meticulously reported what she saw and how she lived in China before and during World War II.

Chosen by the Soong sisters to be their official biographer, Emily followed them to Chungking, where Japanese planes rained bombs upon Chiang Kai-shek's government and where Madame Chiang poured her legendary energy into making marmalade. Watching the bombing of the British Embassy while picnicking in the neighboring hills, Emily gives a vividly detailed description of the visual spectacle while confessing, "Sometimes it was too much for our nerves."

When World War II began and Japanese troops seized Hong Kong, Emily was there, with her newborn daughter whose father was now a wounded prisoner of war. It was a time during which she resisted the melodrama that could well have taken over her life. Death, starvation, looting and rape are all in the backdrop of Emily’s story, while never being allowed center stage. As she manages to find food for her baby and for Charles, as she makes her way through the Japanese bureaucracy in a successful attempt to stay out of an internment camp, as she learns how to maneuver in a black market economy, Emily tells her story in the calm, dispassionate tones of a woman who had no energy to spare for flamboyant emotional displays.

Explaining why gold and diamonds are the key to wartime survival, or the stark terror felt after waking up after a night of serious drinking to discover that while in her cups she had slapped the Japanese chief of Foreign Affairs, or the shame of listening to American propaganda broadcasts that extolled the success of bombing raids on Hong Kong which had in truth accomplished nothing at all, Emily gives a clear and rarely seen picture of war, the one that is shared by the noncombatants who struggle to survive.

Emily rather unfairly dismissed China To Me as an "egotistical history" but generations of readers have given it the status of a classic. As resilient as Ms. Hahn herself, this book has bounced in and out of print since it was first published in 1946, and waits now in used bookstores across the world to be rediscovered one more time.~Janet Brown

Untangling My Chopsticks by Victoria Abbott Riccardi (Broadway Books/Random House)

"I have always believed you can learn as much about a culture by the ingredients that they put in their mouths, as by the buildings they erect", says Victoria Abbott Riccardi. She's a woman who has definitely put her money where her mouth is, having abandoned her high-powered Manhattan advertising job where "stress poisoned the air" to live in Kyoto and study the art of preparing kaiseki meals, the elaborate food that is served at a tea ceremony.

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A veteran of a year at Le Cordon Bleu and a former sous-chef at a Parisian restaurant, Victoria was more than a casual cook. She had already been immersed in the discipline and techniques of haute cuisine and possessed a culinary confidence that would serve her well while she studied at one of Kyoto's leading tea schools.

The art of tea originated in Kyoto's 12th century Zen monasteries, spread to the imperial court, and became an artistic and spiritual influence throughout Japan. Making tea in a formal ceremony is a "spiritual ballet" and the food served with the tea is "a set series of tiny exquisite dishes that change with the seasons." When accepted at a school where her teacher was a direct descendant of the man who refined the tea ceremony in the 16th century, Victoria became steeped in the highly detailed history of a complex ritual.

Balancing the extreme formality of tea kaiseki was Stephen, the American fellow-student who became Victoria's mentor, and Tomiko, the woman who opened her household and the art of Japanese home-cooking to a stranger. Living and cooking with Tomiko's family, while preparing kaiseki with Stephen for tea ceremonies that took place away from their classroom, Victoria traveled beyond the world of a foreigner's guesthouse to a place that visitors seldom see.

From exploring supermarkets to learning the symbolism of her tea school's "paradise garden," from making delicate cherry-sized orbs from sea-urchin eggs and lily bulbs to pounding rice with a mallet for mochi cakes at New Year's, learning from painful experience the waist-choking discomfort of an obi-bound kimono and the humiliation of "feeling like a big, fat Alice in Wonderland" when wearing a baby-doll dress and a frilly pinafore in a short-lived modeling assignment, Victoria reveals the contrasts of her year in Kyoto in vivid and candid stories.

With an artist's eye, she gives precise descriptions of the city's seasonal beauty, of streets that lead back into time, of the visual abundance and glory of a fresh food market. She recreates the sheer terror of standing before a class of Japanese five-year-olds, the difficulties of being a "lounge lady" at an English conversation club, and the special problems of introducing her visiting New Yorker boyfriend to the pleasures of the public bath and a holiday at "the Jersey shore of Japan." She explains why a sushi chef has good reason to hate anyone who adds wasabi to the soy sauce that accompanies sushi, and perhaps best of all, at the end of almost every chapter she provides recipes for the food that she has enticingly described.

Although not a travel guide, this is undoubtedly a book that will launch a thousand trips. It should be tucked into the luggage of any first-time visitor to Kyoto.~Janet Brown


The Gate by Francois Bizot (Vintage Books/Random House)

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Francois Bizot was a Khmer-speaking Frenchman, an ethnologist who searched for old manuscripts and art that would illuminate the religion and customs of ancient Cambodia. A man whose only gods were Saul Steinberg and Charlie Parker, Bizot lived in a village near Angkor Wat with his Cambodian wife and their little daughter. His world was “enameled with paddy fields, dotted with temples, a country of peace and simplicity.” Then the war in Vietnam spilled over the border into Cambodia and Bizot and his family moved to the urban safety of Phnom Penh.

While working thirty miles from Phnom Penh with two of his Cambodian colleagues, Bizot and his companions were captured by a group of Khmer Rouge. They marched at gunpoint for three days to a remote village, where they were confined on their backs, their ankles shackled within two wooden beams. As they lay there alone and in pain, they could hear the sound of bare feet approaching and a group of young girls, “pretty,” Bizot noted, “ just like those from my own village,” surrounded them and spat on their faces.

The man who was in charge of this Khmer Rouge outpost was young, thin and suffering from malaria. “His authority was total. His silences were mightier than words.” Repeatedly he came to Bizot with pen and paper to receive written declarations of innocence. Bizot's statements were written in French but the conversations that he began to have with his jailer were in Khmer. “The bonds gradually forming between us depended entirely on our capacity to understand each other on common ground and this could be done only in his language.”

It was Bizot's ability to communicate in Cambodia’s language that convinced his captor of his innocence and prompted this man to persuade the Khmer Rouge leadership that the Frenchman should be freed. After three months of imprisonment, living in shackles, witnessing death, and experiencing humiliation and torment, Bizot was released. No other prisoner left that camp alive; his Cambodian colleagues were executed after his departure, despite assurances from the leader of the camp that they would be safe.

Four years later, the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh. The Americans had fled, Bizot had sent his daughter to France, and his wife joined the crowd of Cambodians who were ordered to evacuate the city.

Sent to the French embassy with all other foreign residents of Phnom Penh, Bizot used his Khmer language skills once more to advantage, becoming the link between the Khmer Rouge leadership and the foreign community, and the only foreigner authorized to leave the embassy walls. His descriptions of a city emptied of its inhabitants and of the Cambodian people who were denied the safety that lay behind the gate of the embassy are haunting and soul-wrenching.

Long after the Pol Pot years had passed, Bizot returned to visit Cambodia. The camp where he was held has become famously known as Anlong Veng and is now a tourist attraction. The man who held him prisoner and was responsible for his release is known to the world as Douch, the infamous leader at Tuol Sleng, the Phnom Penh high school that was turned into a center of torture and death. Bizot’s history, lived in Khmer, written in French, and translated into English, provides stunning testimony to whatever International Tribunal may someday stand in belated judgment.~Janet Brown

The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)

Teza, known as “The Songbird,” lives in a cage, sentenced to twenty years of solitary confinement in a Burmese prison. He’s a twenty-five-year-old man who had wanted to be a rock star but his Twelve Songs of Protest fed Burma’s rebellion instead. Locked away in a “teak coffin,” he is starving for food, for the touch of the woman who, after the first seven years of his imprisonment, had married someone else, and for the freedom “to speak and be spoken to.”

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Teza’s name means the fire of power and glory, and this fire lives in his voice. He sings his songs almost silently because to send them out for others to hear would add years to his prison sentence. He talks to the insects that live in his cell, to a jailer who becomes his friend and ally, and to the man who brings him meals and will betray him.

Within the walls of this prison lives a child, the son of a man who had worked there until his death turned the seven-year-old boy into an orphan. Searching for a safe place, the child builds himself a shelter from bits of scrap and becomes an errand boy, carrying meals and messages and contraband to the prisoners. The prison is his world; he dreams of leaving to see Rangoon’s splendor but his fear holds him back. At twelve, he is a boy without a name, known as Nyi Lay, Little Brother, who hoards old books given to him by prisoners but who cannot read, who never eats enough food to subdue the pain of his growing legs, and who has learned that to be silent is to be unharmed.

A cheap ball-point pen is the instrument of Teza’s betrayal and a treasure that inexplicably lands in Nyi Lay’s path. Soon after this new possession comes his way, the boy begins serving meals to a prisoner whose jaw is so badly broken that he cannot speak or eat without tearing pain, a man who pushes his food tray back to Nyi Lay and manages to utter one agonizing syllable, “Eat.”

Teza, brutally beaten and pulled back from death by a political system who values him as a symbol of imprisoned rebellion, is diverted from his morphine-fueled dreams only by the boy who brings him food, a nameless, silent child who resembles Teza’s younger brother. He feeds Nyi Lay, speaks to the boy through the jagged pain of his broken jaw, and slowly, in a place of brutality and impotence and filth, Teza hatches a plan filled with hope and power.

Karen Connelly has recreated this prison world and its inhabitants with careful research and the piercing language of a poet. The Lizard Cage is not an easy book to read nor is it easy to forget once finished. It is a book that will haunt imaginations, inhabit minds, and perhaps change lives.~Janet Brown

More books on Myanmar at ThingsAsian Books

Ho Chi Minh: A Biography by Pierre Brocheux/translated by Claire Duiker (Cambridge)

Ho Chi Minh

Ho Chi Minh

It was an internationally acknowledged fact, when World War II was over, that Vietnam needed "protection". The French were eager to repossess their former colony. Chiang Kai-shek's government wanted to welcome Vietnam into "the great Chinese family." Franklin Roosevelt claimed that Vietnam would flourish under American stewardship. The only dissenter to these magnanimous offers was Vietnam.

On September 2, 1945, a declaration of independence announcing the birth of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam was read aloud by Ho Chi Minh. Middle-aged and physically frail, this was a man who had been so sick with malaria that he had been, only months before, “ a bunch of bones, staring with glazed eyes,” a man of many names who had been away from his country for thirty years and was now its figurehead.

Nguyen Tat Thanh was decades away from being Ho Chi Minh in 1911, when he arrived in France from Vietnam, an easily scandalized twenty-one-year-old who immediately asked “Why don’t the French civilize their own people instead of trying to civilize us?” Changing his name to Nguyen Ai Quoc, Nguyen the Patriot, he became a political activist, petitioning the Allies at Versailles in 1919 for Vietnam’s equality, autonomy and political freedom.

Lenin’s writing persuaded Quoc that revolution would end colonial oppression This led him to Communism and to Moscow, where he attended Lenin’s funeral, standing for hours in the frigid cold that left scars on his hands from frostbite.

Quoc traveled, studied and forged political ties in Russia, China, Southeast Asia and Europe. Delightful, diplomatic and blessed with a gift for languages, he was described by the poet Osip Mandelstam as “a man of culture…the culture of the future.”

Arrested and imprisoned in Hong Kong as a Communist criminal, Quoc faced extradition to Vietnam where he was faced with execution for “plots and assassinations.” His charm saved him. A British solicitor, Frank Loseby, visited Quoc and later wrote, “After thirty minutes, I was entirely won over.” Quoc’s death from tuberculosis was announced, and, with Loseby’s help, he was disguised as a Chinese scholar and escaped to Russia. Years later he reappeared in Vietnam as the resurrected Nguyen Ai Quoc, after having established himself as Ho Chi Minh, Well of Light, leader of the Viet Minh resistance movement and the man who would spearhead his country’s battle for freedom.

Ho’s life was defined by politics and his passion for Vietnam’s liberation; this biography is dense with historical and political background. Yet the man shines through the thicket of facts, with his wit and his poetry making Ho alive on the page: a Confucianist who adapted to Stalin and Mao, a man who fought France but loved the French, a poet who, while living in a cave for a year, wrote “Really, the life of the revolutionary is not lacking in charm.” Pierre Brocheux brings out a concise but skillful portrait from history’s obscuring layers of sainthood and demonization, allowing Ho to declare once more, “I am a normal man.”~Janet Brown