Thailand Books

The King Never Smiles: A Biography of Thailand's Bhumibol Adulyadej

Paul M. Handley

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 46 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Thailand’s Bhumibol Adulyadej, the only king ever born in the United States, came to the throne of his country in 1946 and is now the world’s longest-serving monarch. The King Never Smiles, the first independent biography of Thailand's monarch, tells the unexpected story of Bhumibol's life and sixty-year rule—how a Western-raised boy came to be seen by his people as a living Buddha, and how a king widely seen as beneficent and apolitical could in fact be so deeply political and autocratic.
Paul Handley provides an extensively researched, factual account of the king’s youth and personal development, ascent to the throne, skillful political maneuverings, and attempt to shape Thailand as a Buddhist kingdom. Handley takes full note of Bhumibol's achievements in art, in sports and jazz, and he credits the king's lifelong dedication to rural development and the livelihoods of his poorest subjects. But, looking beyond the widely accepted image of the king as egalitarian and virtuous, Handley portrays an anti-democratic monarch who, together with allies in big business and the corrupt Thai military, has protected a centuries-old, barely modified feudal dynasty.
When at nineteen Bhumibol assumed the throne, the Thai monarchy had been stripped of power and prestige. Over the ensuing decades, Bhumibol became the paramount political actor in the kingdom, silencing critics while winning the hearts and minds of his people. The book details this process and depicts Thailand’s unique constitutional monarch—his life, his thinking, and his ruling philosophy.

A History of Thailand

Chris Baker, Pasuk Phongpaichit

Amazon Price: $19.79 List Price: $21.99 By: Cambridge University Press Amazon Marketplace: 36 new & used starting at $4.93

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

One of the best history book on Thailand 4 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

I am a Thai and since my childhood I have read many history books on our nation. All of those books is written by Thai, mostly in the view of historians. This book looks into Thai history from the view of economist. That makes it unique and more interesting (at least for me). For the readers who want to know about Thai history, this book should be the first one to read.

Editorial Review:

Covering the past three centuries of Thai history, this book reveals how a landscape of sparsely populated forest and jungle was transformed into villages and paddy fields, with a rural society of smallholder peasants and an urban society populated mainly by migrants from southern China. It demonstrates how throughout the twentieth century, Thailand has been drawn into the international system, the American camp in the Cold War, the economic gambit of rising Japan, and more recently, the forces of globalization. The authors also survey the country's transformation accompanying massive social evolution over recent decades. (Control of the nation state is still contested between forces with a patriarchal belief in change from above, and advocates of democracy and liberal values.)

Birds of Thailand (Princeton Field Guides)

Craig Robson

Amazon Price: $19.77 List Price: $29.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Princeton University Press Amazon Marketplace: 27 new & used starting at $18.76

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Subjects -> Outdoors & Nature -> Birdwatching -> General
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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Thailand is the mecca of birding in Southeast Asia. It's convenient to get to and get around, and its birdlife is wondrously diverse, exotic, and plentiful. With Birds of Thailand, Craig Robson and fourteen leading illustrators give us the most up-to-date, comprehensive, and concise field guide to this magnificent country's rich avifaunal heritage in recent years, covering the more than 950 species recorded as of early in the new millennium.

Facing each of the 128 striking, full-color plates are species accounts accompanied by maps for each, illustrating precise distribution within Thailand. The accurate text covers identification, voice, habitat, behavior, range, status, and breeding for all species and subspecies. Illustrations and entries on a number of species recorded only quite recently are also included.

The country's varied habitats assure something for every birder, from freshwater marshes to coastal areas, from fields and rice paddies to lush jungles and mangrove forests. In Thailand, one can delight in the brilliantly colored pittas, broadbills, and sunbirds; the deep, dazzling green of barbets, parrots, parakeets, and leafbirds; the aptly named frogmouths; the roosterlike resplendence of the (male) red junglefowl; the ruff, whose breeding male in full plumage sports a truly singular head; and much, much more.

Birders and all ecologically minded travelers daydreaming of a voyage to this gem of a country will want the latest source of thorough information on its birdlife--in a highly portable, pithy, and vividly illustrated guide. What they will want is Craig Robson's Birds of Thailand.

• Comprehensive field guide written specifically for this magnificent, bird-rich country
• 128 full-color plates by expert artists covering every major plumage variation, with juveniles also illustrated where notably distinct from males and females
• Over 950 maps for individual species illustrating their precise distribution within Thailand
• Accurate, up-to-date, and concise text covering identification, voice, habitat and behavior, range, status, and breeding of all species and distinctive subspecies

Asia Shock: Horror and Dark Cinema from Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, and Thailand

Patrick Galloway

Amazon Price: $13.57 List Price: $19.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Stone Bridge Press Amazon Marketplace: 40 new & used starting at $7.60

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Asian Extreme cinema is hot, and this book lays it out in all its gory glory. Patrick Galloway, who last looked at samurai movies in his well-received Stray Dogs and Lone Wolves, now takes on Asian masters of suspense, exploitation, the supernatural, and bone-chilling, blood-curdling fear and evil. The films featured here are pan-Asian, including Korea and Thailand, and represent a mix of classics and the contemporary cutting edge. Included are viewing tips and overviews of genres and cultures.

"Galloway has all sorts of interesting insights and facts that'll make you want to rewatch your favorites, or check out some that you've never seen." -- Wired

"It has a conversational feel, as if you're sitting down with a film buddy and just discussing the film." -- Twitch

"What with brain-sauce spaghetti, switchblade cellphones, and other wonders, could horror flicks from Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong be any better? PatrickGalloway savors the genre in Asia Shock." East Bay Express

Thailand: The Golden Kingdom

William Warren, Luca Invernizzi Tettoni

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

The Golden Kingdom 5 out of 5 stars.
12 of 12 people found this review helpful.

This is a great coffee table book! At a reasonable price. It is loaded with beautiful photography of many different aspects of Thailand. If you love Thailand you will love this book. If you know nothing of Thailand this book will make you want to learn more. When your friends see it they will be ooing and aawing.

Thailand: The Golden Kingdom 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This was a gift for a friend that loves Thailand and lived and traveled there extensively. He loved this book. It is a great reminder of all he loved about such a beautiful country.

Editorial Review:

Over 140 stunning full color photographs illustrate the history, culture art of this fascinatingly beautiful and diverse land.

Last Man Out: Surviving the Burma-Thailand Death Railway: A Memoir

H. Robert Charles

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Read this and be enriched and humbled. 5 out of 5 stars.
9 of 10 people found this review helpful.

I have had the pleasure of knowing the author for going on 8 years now. His memoir of his time as a prisoner of the Japanese, building the Death Railroad, the real Bridge on the River Kwai, is riveting, and sadly the suffering of POWs is little known.

In the decades since returning from the War, the author has had a distinguished career requiring excellent writing and editing skills, and this book reflects that. It's an easy read, and when you've finished it, you will most likely re-evaluate the struggles and low points of your daily routine.

Lastly, the man who is the subject of the book, Dr. Henri Hekking of the Dutch Colonial Army, will instill in you a sense of awe in the medical skills he learned from native Javanese sources, and how these skills, scorned by English and American doctors, saved *so many* of the men under his care, the author included.

This book adds greatly to, and dovetails with, Hornfisher's latest, and compliments Winslow's "Galloping Ghost...".

Editorial Review:

From June 1942 to October 1943, more than 100,000 Allied POWs who had been forced into slave labor by the Japanese died building the infamous Burma-Thailand Death Railway, an undertaking immortalized in the film "The Bridge on the River Kwai." One of the few who survived was American Marine H. Robert Charles, who describes the ordeal in vivid and harrowing detail in Last Man Out. The story mixes the unimaginable brutality of the camps with the inspiring courage of the men, including a Dutch Colonial Army doctor whose skill and knowledge of the medicinal value of wild jungle herbs saved the lives of hundreds of his fellow POWs, including the author.

Very Thai

Philip Cornwel-Smith

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

What a super book! 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 14 people found this review helpful.

This book contains many explanations of the apparent vagaries of Thai pop culture, and is profusely illustrated with superb photographs. I have been living here for 7-8 years and have grown accustomed to a lot of this -- and I find a lot of it delightful.

For example, when I moved back to Thailand in 2002 ("Bye Bye Internet Bubble!") I was intrigued to find out that the room out in front of my house was being used as a make-up central and staging ground for Thai ladyboys who were going off to compete in beauty contests! Sometimes the "utterly bizarre" occurred -- a friend or a sister would appear with an urgent problem, and this teenage Thai boy would rush outside to consult, wearing nothing but his underwear and a fully-made up Thai female head!

What may take the cake, for some lingering Puritans, is that some of these "lady-boy beauty contests" took place at temple fairs. In the grounds of Buddhist temples.

Well, when the good folks in Austin, Texas begin holding such beauty contests for the Church Fair, I guess we will have reached some sort of parity! Right now it seems a little hard to imagine. (I don't think the Pope would like it, either. :-) )

But I digress...or do I? One of the salient facts about Thailand is that it seems to be a country which is entirely free of homophobia, at least among Thai families. The Chinese-Thai are a different story. But in Thailand, and in Burma, there is just NOTHING in the culture which is homophobic. I learn from the book under review that the monk celebrated for sculpting phallic amulets (!) recommended carrying the amulet in the right pocket when going to visit a female, and in the left pocket when going to visit a male. (I may have reported that backwards, sorry!)

But other piercing questions are answered: why are those little tiny napkins in restaurants -- why are they so tiny, and why are they always pink? You''ll have to read the book to find out!

Basically, the book is just a feast for people who love Thailand. Lots of details on the Big Bird (Garuda) -- wingspan 12,800 kilometers! Lots of details about Thai hawker food, pop stars, the high-society crowd, and all the other Thai people who make this country such a fascinating place!

Highest possible recommendation!

Thailand: A Short History

David K. Wyatt

Amazon Price: $16.50 List Price: $25.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Yale University Press Amazon Marketplace: 32 new & used starting at $9.90

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Not worth the time or money 1 out of 5 stars.
5 of 9 people found this review helpful.

I bought this book a few months before a planned trip to Thailand hoping to learn more about their origins. I did not get anything from this book. I thought that it was terribly unreadable. I have two major complaints:
1. It reads as though it is a grocery list. Sentence after sentence is bogged down with unpronouncable names that don't add anything to the major concepts. (I would love to give a quote as an example, but I seem to have lost the book; apparently I thought so little of it that I didn't even deem it worthy enough for the bookshelf)
2. There are not nearly enough maps, especially in the beginning chapters. Wyatt is constantly refering to cities and places in their geographical relationships, but he doesn't provide any pictures of what he is trying to convey. So you just end up with a jumble of names that are somewhere in Asia. And with the constantly changing political boundaries in the early history, a few maps would seem obligatory, but there aren't any.

Overall, I was very, very disappointed with this book. I couldn't even finish it because it was so dull and hard to read. (Mr. Wyatt, not every history book needs to be like this.) Don't waste your time or money. Instead, go with a general south Asian history book; you'll pick up the important things and leave behind the excruciating details.

Editorial Review:

This highly acclaimed book, the standard history of Thailand for almost twenty years, has now been completely revised by the author. David K. Wyatt has also added new sections examining the social and economic changes that have transformed the country in the past two decades.

When Elephants Paint: The Quest of Two Russian Artists to Save the Elephants of Thailand

Komar & Melamid, David Eggers, Mia Fineman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Once revered as semidivine beings and collaborators in the hard work of transporting goods and materials, Thailand's elephants have fallen on hard times. With the destruction of their forested habitats, a consequent nationwide ban on hardwood logging, and the decline of traditional agriculture in the rapidly urbanizing country, their numbers have declined from tens of thousands just a decade ago to only a few thousand today. Many of the surviving elephants have been put to work in traveling circuses or used for black-market labor, subject to overwork and all manner of abuse.

Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, Russian expatriates who have been working together for more than 30 years, have a knack, writes art curator Mia Fineman, for "transforming the solemn rituals of high art into high comedy." It was with the utmost seriousness, however, that the two, on reading of the elephants' plight, traveled to Thailand and established the Thai Elephant Art School, through whose offices elephants create pop-art masterpieces with palette, brush, and trunk. (Elephants, it seems, have a well-known gift for the visual arts and, in the Thai case, adore the work of Vasily Kandinsky.) Sold to collectors on the world market, pachyderm-painted pieces generated $75,000 at a single early auction, the proceeds of which were used to establish and maintain sanctuaries throughout Thailand.

Illustrated with elephantine artwork and more than 100 photographs documenting Komar and Melamid's project, this book makes a wonderfully offbeat gift, and one of a very good cause. --Gregory McNamee

Fashion Accessories: The Complete 20th Century Sourcebook

John Peacock

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A companion volume to John Peacock's 20th Century Fashion and Men's Fashion, Fashion Accessories is the most comprehensive record ever published of fashion accessories throughout the twentieth century. More than 2000 full-color drawings -- the result of extensive research into paintings, photographs, and the accessories themselves -- reproduce each original item in meticulous detail, accompanied by a complete description. The book covers every kind of high-fashion male and female accessory for both day and evening wear: hats and caps; shoes, boots, slippers, and sandals; bags and purses; umbrellas and parasols; jewelry; scarves, stoles, and capes; gloves and belts; cravats, ties, and bow-ties. It includes a wide range of streetwear and sportswear, from baseball caps to plastic sandals, and every variety of the ubiquitous late-century sports shoe. All the century's archetypal accessories are identified, from the luxurious ostrich-feather and flower-bedecked hat of the 1910s and the cloche and pearl necklace of the 1920s, to the velvet scarf and mini-backpack of the 1990s. A final reference section contains a comprehensive bibliography and a chart that shows at a glance how accessories have evolved since 1900. There are biographies of the century's most influential accessories designers, from Salvatore Ferragamo and Manolo Blahnik to Patrick Cox and Georgina von Etzdorf, plus short histories of companies and firms that have played an important role in accessory design. For fashion enthusiasts, historians, and collectors, as well as designers working in the performing arts, this book will be the definitive reference work on twentieth-century accessories.