Review of Man after His Kind by Grant Wales

We know – some of us more vaguely than others – the story of Noah and the flood. God, in His typical wisdom, has decided that His creations have failed Him in some way and so must be almost completely eradicated by a scouring flood they will have no way of resisting. However, given His extraordinary mercy, He decides to select a well-known alcoholic with a dysfunctional family to disclose important information on how to build a giant boat which will enable him – it is
Noah, of course – and his mostly nuclear family to survive as long as they take two specimens of every known species of animal on board with them. After the designated deluge takes place, Noah and his ark wash up on a mountain and repopulate the earth from their own resources.

Read the full review here.

Review of Ahmad Majeed’s Smartphone

I used to include in my teaching just a few years ago that, notwithstanding all the undoubted improvements in the technology of mobile telecommunications, still 50% of the world’s population had never actually made a phone call. This situation has now completely changed since the diffusion of mobile telephones, their reduction in size and cost has meant that their penetration into just about every country in the world has been complete. Migrant workers, for
example, use the mobile phone in the millions as an invaluable link to home and family – in many cases, it is just about the only personal item of any value that they own.

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Review of Quagmire by David Biggs

One of the principal themes of Vietnamese history over the long-term has been the steady move to the south – nam tien – that has seen the Viet people progress down the narrow coastal strip from their centre in Hanoi and the Hong River plain to, ultimately, the Mekong Delta region at the southeastern tip of the continent of Asia. This is a process that has taken some two thousand years and has involved numerous advances and retreats.

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Review of Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air

Author Marshall Berman begins the preface to this third edition of his penetrating book:

“… I define modernism as any attempt by modern men and women to become subjects as well as objects of modernization, to get a grip on the modern world and make themselves at home in it (p.5).”

This implies that modernity lends agency to people; that is, it gives them the ability (if they are able to recognize and grasp it) to change the world around them.

Read the full review here.

Review of Hamilton’s Great North Road

It is the twenty second century and convenient wormholes in space have been discovered to link the earth with a variety of other planets, each more or less suitable for habitation. At once, there is a ready stream of people willing to and chance their luck on another world: quite a few of them perceive themselves to be subject to persecution or oppression of one sort or another and leg it to a place where they can be free (or FREE as I expect they would say), religious fanatics and criminals also pass through the wormhole (it is a British trait to export our troublemakers elsewhere) where they can bother and shoot up foreigners instead.

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Review of Custers’s Capital Accumulation and Women’s Labour in Asian Economies

With a new wave of rapid, factory-based industrialization taking place in countries such as Cambodia and Laos, with prospects for the same to occur in Myanmar, which is associated with an intensification of the use of women in advanced capitalist occupations, it is very welcome to see a new issue of Peter Custers’s ground-breaking work on the nature of capital accumulation in such economies and its interactions with the labour of women.

Read the full review here.

Review of Chambers and Croissant’s Democracy under Stress

 

The 2006 military coup in Thailand and subsequent attempt by the army to govern the country through a proxy administration has been just one reminder of the persistent significance of the military in developing Asia.

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Review of Bizot’s Facing the Torturer

Readers interested in the modern history of the Mekong Region will be familiar with François Bizot’s previous work, The Gate, which described the author’s experiences in Cambodia during the rise of the Khmer Rouge and his own arrest and incarceration. Elements of that experience are reflected in the film The Killing Fields, as too are elements from Jon Swain’s The River of Time, which covers the same period and events.

Read the full review here.

Review of Scanlon’s How to Get More from Your Satnav

This short book (it runs to 133 pages in the pdf version I was sent for review) is packed full of information about, as the title suggests, how to get more from a satnav. For those who may not know, a satnav is one of the computerized systems that sits on the dashboard of a car (or some other location – Mr. Scanlon several times recommends finding a location that does not interfere with the driver’s vision – good advice which people where I live in Bangkok would do well to observe, since so many have TVs mounted on their dashboards) or else as an application on an advanced technology mobile phone and which will provide information on the best way to reach a destination entered into the software
interface.

Read the full review here.

Review of A Hill of Bean by Bennett G Edwards

Born in the pungently named and now redeveloped neighborhood of Black Bottom in Detroit, talented young black man (his color is important to the story and, indeed, central) Bennett G. Edwards is able to escape and make a lengthy and varied career for himself. He has some help along the way, of course: his father was well-established and was able to buy apartments for cash.

Read the full review here.