Thai Street Food transports readers straight into the bustling heart of Thailand’s colorful street stalls and markets--from the predawn rounds of monks fanning out along the aisles to the made-to-order stalls ablaze in neon and jammed with hungry locals after dark. Featuring nearly 100 authentic dishes plus lavish photography accompanying every recipe, this stunning cookbook is the definitive guide to Thailand’s culinary street culture. The recipes, such as Steamed Fish with Chilli and Lime Sauce, Pork Satay, Roast Duck and Egg Noodle Soup, and Sweet Banana Roti illuminate the beguiling world of food so integral to the Thais.  Scholar and chef David Thompson lives with a singular passion for Thailand’s customs, culture, and people. Although he claims “It’s all about the food,” this ambitious work shares his insights into the rhythms and nuances of Thai daily life along with a fascinating history of its richly diverse street cuisine. This cookbook is a tempting, inspiring, and authoritative account of Thai street food, the vibrant culinary mosaic rich with community.

Loet Velmans was 17 when the Germans invaded his native Holland in 1940. Almost immediately, he and his family decided to escape to London, which they did on board the Dutch Coast Guard cutter, Seaman's Hope. Deciding theyt would be safer in the Far East, the family sailed to the Dutch East Indies-now Indonesia-where Loet joined the Dutch army. In March 1942, the Japanese invaded the archipelago, conquered it in a week, and made prisoners of the local Dutch soldiers. For the next three and a half years Loet and his fellow POW's were sent to slave labor camps to build a railroad through the dense jungle on the Burmese-Thailand border, to invade and conquer India. Some 200,000 POW's and slave laborers died in building this Railroad of Death. Loet, though suffering from malaria, dysentery, malnutrition, and unspeakable maltreatment, never gave up hope...and survived. Fifty-seven years later he returned to revisit the place where he should have died and where he had buried his closest friend. From that emotional visit came this stunning memoir.

Slavery is illegal throughout the world, yet more than twenty-seven million people are still trapped in one of history's oldest social institutions. Kevin Bales's disturbing story of slavery today reaches from brick kilns in Pakistan and brothels in Thailand to the offices of multinational corporations. His investigation of conditions in Mauritania, Brazil, Thailand, Pakistan, and India reveals the tragic emergence of a "new slavery," one intricately linked to the global economy. The new slaves are not a long-term investment as was true with older forms of slavery, explains Bales. Instead, they are cheap, require little care, and are disposable.Three interrelated factors have helped create the new slavery. The enormous population explosion over the past three decades has flooded the world's labor markets with millions of impoverished, desperate people. The revolution of economic globalization and modernized agriculture has dispossessed poor farmers, making them and their families ready targets for enslavement. And rapid economic change in developing countries has bred corruption and violence, destroying social rules that might once have protected the most vulnerable individuals.Bales's vivid case studies present actual slaves, slaveholders, and public officials in well-drawn historical, geographical, and cultural contexts. He observes the complex economic relationships of modern slavery and is aware that liberation is a bitter victory for a child prostitute or a bondaged miner if the result is starvation.Bales offers suggestions for combating the new slavery and provides examples of very positive results from organizations such as Anti-Slavery International, the Pastoral Land Commission in Brazil, and the Human Rights Commission in Pakistan. He also calls for researchers to follow the flow of raw materials and products from slave to marketplace in order to effectively target campaigns of "naming and shaming" corporations linked to slavery. Disposable People is the first book to point the way to abolishing slavery in today's global economy.All of the author's royalties from this book go to fund anti-slavery projects around the world.

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.

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.)

How the West's greatest spy in Asia tried to stop the new American way of war—and the steep price he paid for failingJim Thompson landed in Thailand at the end of World War II, a former American society dilettante who became an Asian legend as a spy and silk magnate with access to Thai worlds outsiders never saw. As the Cold War reached Thailand, America had a choice: Should it, as Thompson believed, help other nations build democracies from their traditional cultures or, as his ex-OSS friend Willis Bird argued, remake the world through deception and self-serving alliances? In a story rich with insights and intrigue, this book explores a key Cold War episode that is still playing out today.Highlights a pivotal moment in Cold War history that set a course for American foreign policy that is still being followed todayExplores the dynamics that put Thailand at the center of the Cold War and the fighting in neighboring Laos that escalated from sideshow to the largest covert operation America had ever engaged inDraws on personal recollections and includes atmospheric details that bring the people, events—and the Thailand of the time—to lifeWritten by a journalist with extensive experience in Asian affairs who has spent years investigating every aspect of this story, including Thompson's tragic disappearance

Stories centering on the lovelorn ghost (Mae Nak) and the magical monk (Somdet To) are central to Thai Buddhism. Historically important and emotionally resonant, these characters appeal to every class of follower. Metaphorically and rhetorically powerful, they invite constant reimagining across time. Focusing on representations of the ghost and monk from the late eighteenth century to the present, Justin Thomas McDaniel builds a case for interpreting modern Thai Buddhist practice through the movements of these transformative figures. He follows embodiments of the ghost and monk in a variety of genres and media, including biography, film, television, drama, ritual, art, liturgy, and the Internet. Sourcing nuns, monks, laypeople, and royalty, he shows how relations with these figures have been instrumental in crafting histories and modernities. McDaniel is especially interested in local conceptions of being "Buddhist" and the formation and transmission of such identities across different venues and technologies. Establishing an individual's "religious repertoire" as a valid category of study, McDaniel explores the performance of Buddhist thought and ritual through practices of magic, prognostication, image production, sacred protection, and deity and ghost worship, and clarifies the meaning of multiple cultural configurations. Listening to popular Thai Buddhist ghost stories, visiting crowded shrines and temples, he finds concepts of attachment, love, wealth, beauty, entertainment, graciousness, security, and nationalism all spring from engagement with the ghost and the monk and are as vital to the making of Thai Buddhism as venerating the Buddha himself. (1/9/2012)

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 country128 full-color plates by expert artists covering every major plumage variation, with juveniles also illustrated where notably distinct from males and femalesOver 950 maps for individual species illustrating their precise distribution within ThailandAccurate, up-to-date, and concise text covering identification, voice, habitat and behavior, range, status, and breeding of all species and distinctive subspecies

This pioneering insight into contemporary Thai folk culture delves beyond the traditional Thai icons to reveal the casual, everyday expressions of Thainess that sodelight and puzzle. From floral truck bolts and taxi altars to buffalo cart furniture and drinks in a bags, the same exquisite care, craft and improvisation resounds through home and street, bar and wardrobe. Never colonised, Thai culture retains nuanced ancient meaning in the most mundane things. The days are colour coded, lucky numbers dictate prices, window grilles become guardian angels, tattoos entrance the wearer. Philip scoured each region to show how indigenous wisdom both adapts to the present and customises imports, applying Roman architecture to shophouses, morphing rock into festive farm music, turning the Japanese motor-rickshaw into the tuk-tuk. Colour-saturated illustrations help you navigate various social traits, whether white-faced hi-so matrons or Red Bullswilling workers wearing coins in their ear. This is Thai culture as it has never been shown before.

Along the Archival Grain offers a unique methodological and analytic opening to the affective registers of imperial governance and the political content of archival forms. In a series of nuanced mediations on the nature of colonial documents from the nineteenth-century Netherlands Indies, Ann Laura Stoler identifies the social epistemologies that guided perception and practice, revealing the problematic racial ontologies of that confused epistemic space. Navigating familiar and extraordinary paths through the lettered lives of those who ruled, she seizes on moments when common sense failed and prevailing categories no longer seemed to work. She asks not what colonial agents knew, but what happened when what they thought they knew they found they did not. Rejecting the notion that archival labor be approached as an extractive enterprise, Stoler sets her sights on archival production as a consequential act of governance, as a field of force with violent effect, and not least as a vivid space to do ethnography.