Thread: The Teak Door Library

The Spanish Armadas


The story of the Spanish Armada, sent crashing to destruction in stormy seas by English battleships, is one of the most famous and popular of British history. Philip II of Spain's crusade to conquer Protestant England was the culmination of an undeclared war between the two nations which had simmered for years. The dramatic destruction of the Spanish fleet by Howard, Drake and their men ensured that England kept her political and religious freedom - but it was not the end of the story. This history places the Spanish Armada in its true context, as the most spectacular of Spain's continued attempts to return England to Catholicism, first through friendship, then by marriage and finally through war. It explains that the 1588 battle was only one in a series of Spanish naval campaigns against England - it was not until the 17th century that peace was fully assured. Winston Graham, author of the Poldark novels, brings all his gifts as a storyteller to this fascinating work, making the momentous sea battles come to life and telling a tale of human hostility and passions.


Excellent read with a lot of first hand accounts from survivors who had a lot of nice things to say about Irish women. Not much good to say about their male opposites though.

Originally Posted by OhOh

Gormenghast - Books 1-3 Titus Groan

A brilliant read.

A quick note to point out that Bizarre Thailand: Tales of Crime, Sex and Black Magic, a book by old Thailand hand and all around good guy Jim Algie, is now available on Amazon.com.

The book’s official site has info on its contents and details on Jim’s interesting background.

Now on Amazon.com: Bizarre Thailand -- Newley.com

Which is available to read free online/download at

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200051.txt

^ did you read it? How did you find it?

Originally Posted by Bettyboo

^ did you read it? How did you find it?

Excellent, well worth a read.

Originally Posted by Bettyboo

^ did you read it? How did you find it?

If you mean this pdf version, just searched the title plus pdf. If you mean the book, sontamslap has a way to go yet.

Originally Posted by khmen

Excellent, well worth a read.

The European's opinion of the Asian does not appear to have changed in the last 100 years.

Conversations with Thaksin : From Exile to Deliverance

ISBN 978-981-4328-68-5

Imprint Marshall Cavendish Editions Author(s) Tom Plate

Specifications 140 x 195 mm (portrait) / 256 pp / cased with jacket

Publication Date Sep-2011

Target Audience General Interest

Price (US) USD 28.50

About the Book

Going home is an iconic theme of literature and music that touches everyone's heart. But rarely has that journey looked more like an impossible dream than for Thaksin Shinawatra, the much loved and much hated former prime minister of Thailand. Expelled from the former Siam by a military coup in 2006, the telecom billionaire retreated to a villa in Dubai to bide his time and plot his triumphant return.

While in exile in Dubai, Thaksin tells his tale of triumph and betrayal to American journalist Tom Plate, as well as his personal thoughts about poverty reduction, power politics, and the future of democracy in Asia - and why he prefers to lose at golf. In this volume, Plate masterfully dissects the mogul who ran his country like a CEO until the tanks came to show who was boss.

About the Author

Professor Tom Plate is the author of eight non fiction books, including the bestsellers Confessions of an American Media Man (2007), Conversations with Lee Kuan Yew (2010) and Conversations with Mahathir Mohamad (2011).

Professor Plate has lectured at major institutions of higher learning in Asia and America, including Kyoto University, United Arab Emirates University, the U.S Pacific Command, and Stanford University. At the University of California, LA, he pioneered courses on the politics and media on Asia. Today he is the Distinguished Scholar of Asian and Pacific Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

Plate's newspaper journalism about Asia was launched in 1996 on the op-ed pages sof the Los Angeles Times. Four years later, it was reconstituted in international syndication, and now appears in other newspapers, making it America's longest-running op-ed column on Asia and America.

A career journalist who has held high-level positions at the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Time magazine, New York magazine, and CBS, among others U.S media institutions, he has been honoured by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the Greater Los Angeles Press Club, and by the California Newspaper Publishers Association. He is a member of the Century Association of New York.

marshallcavendish.com

See Also : https://teakdoor.com/thailand-and-asi...ml#post1999208

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Originally Posted by Norton

Fall of Giants, Ken Follett

If you like exceptional historical fiction this is another form Ken Follett. Make sure you have plenty of time on your hands. 1,000 pages of hard to put down reading.



Fall of Giants is a magnificent new historical epic. The first novel in the Century trilogy, it follows the fates of five interrelated families – American, German, Russian, English and Welsh – as they move through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for women’s suffrage.

Thirteen-year-old Billy Williams enters a man’s world in the Welsh mining pits…Gus Dewar, an American law student rejected in love, finds a surprising new career in Woodrow Wilson’s White House…two orphaned Russian brothers, Grigori and Lev Peshkov, embark on radically different paths half a world apart when their plan to emigrate to America falls afoul of war, conscription and revolution…Billy’s sister, Ethel, a housekeeper for the aristocratic Fitzherberts, takes a fateful step above her station, while Lady Maud Fitzherbert herself crosses deep into forbidden territory when she falls in love with Walter von Ulrich, a spy at the German Embassy in London….

These characters and many others find their lives inextricably entangled as, in a saga of unfolding drama and intriguing complexity, Fall of Giants moves seamlessly from Washington to St. Petersburg, from the dirt and danger of a coal mine to the glittering chandeliers of a palace, from the corridors of power to the bedrooms of the mighty.

I did indeed, I have a kindle version if anyone wants.

ALL THE MISSING SOULS

A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals
By David Scheffer

Princeton Univ. 533 pp. $35


“All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals,” by David SchefferAnthony Dworkin
January 28

The years from 1993 to 2001, when Bill Clinton occupied the White House, were the formative period in the contemporary development of international justice. Before then, there had been no international war crimes tribunals since the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials in the aftermath of World War II. By the end of this time, international courts were hearing cases on war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, negotiations on tribunals for Sierra Leone and Cambodia were far advanced, and the International Criminal Court was nearing its launch.

Throughout this time, David Scheffer was the Clinton administration’s point man on international justice. His book “All the Missing Souls” is a revealing and valuable record of the U.S. role in the effort to entrench accountability for mass atrocities as a central principle in international affairs.


’All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals’ by David Scheffer
(Princeton University Press)

During Clinton’s first term, Scheffer was senior adviser and counsel to Madeleine Albright, who was then ambassador to the United Nations. After Albright became secretary of state in 1997, Scheffer was appointed as the first U.S. ambassador for war crimes issues. The creation of this position testifies to the growing profile that the prevention and punishment of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes came to assume in U.S. foreign policy during the 1990s. But, as Scheffer shows in his detailed account, the process of getting the world’s great powers to make a real effort to enforce accountability for international crimes was anything but smooth.

The horrific violence unleashed against civilians in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda, combined with new expectations about an international role in policing war crimes after the Cold War, was enough to bring the U.N. Security Council to endorse the creation of war crimes tribunals for these countries. But this hardly amounted to a settled commitment to make international justice truly meaningful, either across the U.S. government or internationally. The launch of the Yugoslav tribunal was delayed for months as countries engaged in political horse-trading over the choice of a prosecutor. After a prosecutor was finally appointed, Scheffer had to fight doggedly within the Washington bureaucracy to persuade disdainful defense and intelligence officials to gather and deliver evidence to him. “Real men don’t do this,”one intelligence analyst told him.

Scheffer gives an instructive account of the political and diplomatic intricacies involved in transforming the tribunals from abstract ideals into effective institutions. Working to support an international court for Rwanda, the United States had a series of difficult negotiations with the country’s post-genocide, Tutsi-led government, which could not accept that the ringleaders of the genocide would not face the death penalty, or that the tribunal might also investigate the new rulers’ actions after seizing power. Later discussions with the Cambodian government over a court to prosecute mass killings by the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s were equally fraught, leading to an imperfect tribunal subject to Cambodian influence that Scheffer nevertheless defends as a blow against impunity.

In Bosnia, the work of the tribunal was handicapped by what Scheffer calls the “unbearable timidity” of the United States and its European allies in using their peacekeeping forces to track down and arrest indicted suspects. He is particularly scathing about the failure of French authorities to move against former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who was thought to be in their sector. Finally, Scheffer suggests, French pressure may have led Albright to remove him from the effort to capture Karadzic.

Scheffer writes bluntly about the people he believes stood in the way of the tribunals’ success, displaying an assertive single-mindedness that probably equipped him well to push the cause of international justice in an administration where it was often seen as a low priority. At the same time, he criticizes himself for failing to recognize sooner that the genocide in Rwanda required a response outside the fixed procedures of normal policymaking.

Scheffer’s narrative treats each conflict separately, but two larger issues emerge from his account. First is the complexity of pursuing justice while also trying to bring an end to conflict, particularly when the United States and its allies are not willing or able to deploy a large number of forces to fight on the ground. Provisions on war crimes in the Dayton peace agreement that ended the Bosnian war were watered down to ensure a deal; Scheffer admits it would have been unrealistic to hope for a guarantee of full cooperation with the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal by all parties, but he still claims that the agreement could have gone further than it did. In Sierra Leone, he argues, an initially permissive approach to amnesties for war criminals only prolonged the conflict.

The second issue relates to the position of the United States as a country that has been at the forefront of efforts to prosecute war criminals internationally but bridles at any suggestion that an international tribunal could sit in judgment of its own citizens. The centerpiece of Scheffer’s book is a long and vivid account of the negotiations to set up a permanent International Criminal Court, in which he was forced by the administration to pursue a hopeless quest to ensure that the emerging court could never gain jurisdiction over any American suspect. “I appeared as the guardian of impunity rather than its slayer,”he writes. Although Clinton agreed to sign the court’s founding statute on the final day of his presidency, the United States has not ratified the statute and remains outside the court.
The ambivalent attitude of the world’s most powerful country to international justice, and the relationship between accountability and peace, remain unsettled questions today.

Anthony Dworkin is a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and was formerly the executive director of the Crimes of War Project.

washingtonpost.com

The next two on my list:



A collection of articles by Bai Dong Haing (who writes for Prachatai). Might be a bit beyond my level but will give it a go since, as it says at the bottom of the front cover, อย่าบอกว่าคอการเมือง ถ้ายังไม่ได้อ่านเรื่องของใบตองแห้ง or Don't call yourself a political junkie if you haven't read Bai Dong Haing.

And



A book on Buddhism by a professor of both philosophy and neurobiology at Duke. My interest was spurred by a very good lecture he gave at LSE. The blurb:

If we are material beings living in a material world--and all the scientific evidence suggests that we are--then we must find existential meaning, if there is such a thing, in this physical world. We must cast our lot with the natural rather than the supernatural. Many Westerners with spiritual (but not religious) inclinations are attracted to Buddhism--almost as a kind of moral-mental hygiene. But, as Owen Flanagan points out in The Bodhisattva's Brain, Buddhism is hardly naturalistic. Atheistic when it comes to a creator god, Buddhism is otherwise opulently polytheistic, with spirits, protector deities, ghosts, and evil spirits. Its beliefs include karma, rebirth, nirvana, and nonphysical states of mind. What is a nonreligious, materially grounded spiritual seeker to do? In The Bodhisattva's Brain, Flanagan argues that it is possible to subtract the "hocus pocus" from Buddhism and discover a rich, empirically responsible philosophy that could point us to one path of human flourishing. "Buddhism naturalized," as Flanagan constructs it, contains a metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics; it is a fully naturalistic and comprehensive philosophy, compatible with the rest of knowledge. Some claim that neuroscience is in the process of validating Buddhism empirically, but Flanagan's naturalized Buddhism does not reduce itself to a brain scan showing happiness patterns. Buddhism naturalized offers instead a tool for achieving happiness and human flourishing--a way of conceiving of the human predicament, of thinking about meaning for finite material beings living in a material world.

^ sounds interesting.

Certainly Buddhist philosophy has much more to offer than Buddhist religion (well, 'certainly' for me...). Working in/with Cognitive science/linguistics in a Buddhist country highlights how some of the recent Western science findings seem to have been realized within Eastern philosophy 2,500 years ago; the embodied & experiential version of linguistics is a good example that effectively disarms the 'God's-eye POV' of Western objectivist science (especially of the 19th & 20th centuries).

Originally Posted by Bangyai

I read this a long time ago and liked it a lot. My mother recently gave me a secondhand copy whilst she was here and I've just re read it. Brilliant.

If you interested in how Wounded Knee came to pass and the politics that surrounding it I think you will find this interview with a historian about her new book, "Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre'' (January 12 podcast)
Lewis Lapham Podcast - Bloomberg

^^ You can get a pdf at The Bodhisattva

Originally Posted by robuzo

Originally Posted by Bangyai

I read this a long time ago and liked it a lot. My mother recently gave me a secondhand copy whilst she was here and I've just re read it. Brilliant.

If you interested in how Wounded Knee came to pass and the politics that surrounding it I think you will find this interview with a historian about her new book, "Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre'' (January 12 podcast)
Lewis Lapham Podcast - Bloomberg

Thanks for that. Lucky I dropped in and caught your post. I'll definately give that a read.

Meanwhile, currently re reading this excellent book.




Drawing extensively upon diaries, letters, and family mementos as well as his own frequent travels in the northwest region of India, author Charles Allen here recounts a lively chapter out of British colonial history that prominently featured his ancestor Brigadier General John Nicholson. In 1840, six ambitious young officers, inflamed with patriotism and religious evangelism, set out under Nicholson's leadership to secure the Northwest Frontier for the Raj. Dominated by the strategic Khyber Pass and prone to invasion by Russia and warring tribes from what are today Pakistan and Afghanistan, this region represented British India at its most vulnerable. Its hostile mountain landscape and extreme climate also made it virtually impossible to survey, navigate, supply, or defend. Yet Nicholson and his intrepid band of adventurers combined their martial talents with the courageous instincts of explorers and athletic skills of mountaineers to accomplish the impossible. Allen's exciting narrative sets the scene for "The Great Game," when Europe's imperial powers squared off for control of all of Central Asia.

BANGKOK DAYS, LAWRENCE OSBOURNE.

just finished this book and can recommend it, a beautifully observed study of loneliness.

its on kindle too.


Summer Guide: Lawrence Osbourne Pursues Redeemable Vulgarity in Bangkok Days


Comments By Jed Lipinski Wednesday, May 13 2009


'If you let people do what they want, then you get what exists in Bangkok: sexual mayhem," says Lawrence Osborne, with a roguish gleam in his eye.

We're discussing his newest book, Bangkok Days, which is subtitled A Sojourn in the Capital of Pleasure. Yet instead of providing a detailed chronicle of sexual profligacy, the book dares to suggest the relative innocence of Thai sex tourism: "Intentionally or otherwise," Osborne writes, "the East/West encounter is nearly always redeemed by being slightly comical."



Kris Van Exel/Corbis

Maybe sorta like Henry Miller: Osborne


Related Content





More About

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Over a double espresso, Osborne mentions his respect for Michel Houellebecq, whose 2003 novel Platform—a misanthropic tale of sex and death in Thailand—was greeted with hisses from the American press. "Houellebecq's book was an attack on the idea of sexual liberation," he says in an elegant British accent. "The West boasts about being liberated, yet the premise of Western culture is that you stimulate sexual desire to the nth degree, then make it impossible to consummate


"It's this frustration, in part, that accounts for the number of aging male farangs (i.e., Westerners) sipping gin and tonics on the balconies of Bangkok's opulent hotels, waiting for nightfall.

Bangkok Days, due out in June, is Osborne's sixth book. It arrives in the wake of 2006's The Naked Tourist, a sensual romp through India and Southeast Asia fraught with medical mishaps and epiphanies on the nature of travel. A New York City resident for the past 17 years, Osborne first traveled to Bangkok in 1990. He returned frequently for the inexpensive health care, and on assignments for The New York Times Magazine, for whom he has written articles on psychiatry and medicine. He has since established himself as a kind of romantic anthropologist: following his characters into dissipation, then rising from the ooze and appraising them—and himself—with a lucid, journalistic eye.

Who are his characters? Certainly not the young hedonists of Alex Garland's The Beach. "The young are happy," Osborne says, "and I'm not interested in that. I'm more interested in what happens when people hit this weird invisible wall and give up hope." Hence the adorably lascivious old men that populate Bangkok Days. Dennis, a retired bank manager from Australia, spends his time painting watercolors and purchasing underpriced Viagra.

Of sex with a young Thai woman (named, incidentally, Porntip), he confesses: "It's pleasure, not happiness, but I am happy with that—if you see what I mean." Farlo, a foul-mouthed, bullet-headed Scotsman, keeps an eco-lodge in a mine-riddled region of Cambodia, where he takes his two or three annual tourists deer hunting with ex-members of the Khmer Rouge.

Osborne uses these men, as W.G. Sebald used his own alienated wanderers, to explore the idea of loneliness and the disappearance of the past. Bangkok—home of the largest sex-change facility in the world, where shrines rot in the shadows of iPod billboards and the Beverly Hills Polo Club—is an ideal place for him to observe. What he finds startling is how happy—or, at least, content—his expatriates appear to be. Westerners move to Bangkok, he writes, not only for the "culture of complete physicality," but "precisely because they can never understand it." For lost souls, he implies, losing oneself in an arcane environment may be just as valuable as finding oneself.

Bangkok holds for Osborne the sort of mystical power that Greece held for Henry Miller, who, in The Colossus of Maroussi, celebrated the country's "passion, contradictoriness, confusion, chaos." Osborne works in the same lineage as Miller; he has the same man-in-the-street sensibility, interest in ugliness, and mad enthusiasm for life. But he's more restrained than the author of Tropic of Cancer, content to leave elliptical the rowdier bacchanals he must have witnessed. The book loses none of its strength through these omissions—instead, they reveal the amount of respect Osborne holds for the "chaotic ease" of Bangkok, which has nourished, in one way or another, so many of his fellow exiles.

North Point Press, 271 pp., $25

For anybody not fed up with Thailand and Bangkok I can recommend the following collection of short stories.



http://www.simandan.com/?p=2395

I came away highly impressed with the quality of some of the local writing.

The Irishmen on the river Kwai
MARK HENNESSY, London Editor
Saturday, February 18, 2012


Soldiers, slaves: some of the Irish prisoners of war were worked to death by the Japanese in Thailand.


THE STORY the story of British-army prisoners of the Japanese in the second World War has been well told through the film Bridge Over the River Kwai , in which Alec Guinness played the role of Col Nicholson. In the film, the colonel collaborates with the Japanese efforts to build the bridge, in the hope of winning better treatment for his men – up to, and including, betraying a bid to destroy it.

The reality was different. The river to be crossed was the Khwae Noi, the “little river”, though the Thais renamed it to match the Hollywood creation after the film became an international success.

Hundreds, including six Irishmen, worked under pain of death to build it, according to Robert Widders’s latest work, The Emperor’s Irish Slaves: Prisoners of the Japanese in the Second World War , which is published by the History Press. They were among 650 Irish serving in the British army to fall into Japanese hands. In the years that followed, a quarter of them died; often from illness, but at times from brutal execution, including crucifixion.

Despite the near-impossibility of escaping through the jungle to safety, some tried, including Fusilier Timothy Kenneally from Bishopstown, Co Cork, and Pte Patrick Fitzgerald, from Kilmeaden, Co Waterford, and two others.

A fifth, Cpl Thomas Finn, from Mitchelstown, Co Cork, serving in the First Battalion Manchester Regiment, was shown the rations that had been gathered for the bid, including tinned fish and concentrated soups, and offered a place.

“We turned down the offer for the following reasons: no map, no compass, [and] as we were proceeding further up country, [working] with the Japs, when we reached top camp it would be time enough to start then,” he said.

The four escaped in March 1943, though they were captured two weeks later by Thai police after a confrontation during which they shot one of the police. The Japanese brought the Irishmen back to their camp at Tha Kilen to be executed.

In post-war testimony, Sgt George Priestman recounted that the four were marched out beyond a railway line shortly after 7am on March 27th. A volley of shots, followed by single revolver rounds, was heard after nearly two hours. Later, when Priestman investigated, he found four seven-feet-tall bamboo crosses. A soldier was tied to one of them, his arms outstretched. He had been shot. Nearby, three graves held the remains of the others.

William Perrot, from Askeaton, Co Limerick was beaten and starved before he and others were forced to dig their own graves and then massacred.

Wing Commander Harold Maguire, from Co Clare, was captured on Java, although his wife had to resort to posting a newspaper advert saying she would “gratefully” receive information from other soldiers about her husband. In July 1945 she received a postcard from him in which he told her his health was excellent: he had to write that to ensure that the postcard was accepted by the Japanese for dispatch to the International Red Cross.

In October 1942, 600 Royal Artillery soldiers were loaded on to a former coal ship at Singapore docks, crammed below deck with no water, and buckets of urine were poured down from above.

Headed for the Solomon Islands, 82 seriously ill men were disembarked en route, at Rabaul, on November 6th, 1942. Just 18 survived, including Lance Bombardier Patrick Ahern from Fermoy, Co Cork, and Lance Sgt Patrick (Nobby) Nolan from Wexford. Despite their illnesses, they were put to work unloading rice.

When one refused to drink urine, he was stripped, covered in animal manure, tied to a tree and left to the mercy of the insects. The next morning, he was killed.

In 1951, the POWs, including the Irish, were offered £76 compensation by the Japanese. Forty years later, during a visit to London, the emperor spoke of his country’s “deep sorrow and pain” for the sufferings endured. This apology did not go far enough, in the eyes of the survivors.

Most of the 650 men joined between 1938 and 1942, and the majority of those came in 1940. After the war, one survivor, Frank McGee from Carrick-on-Shannon, who grew up in a Republican family, was asked why he had joined the British army. He replied: “The English are our enemies and nobody else is allowed to fight them.”

While researching his book, Widders spent days in the National Archives at Kew in London, eventually finding a packet wrapped in greaseproof paper “tucked into the corner of one file”. Inside, he found “a little pile” of death certificates, in which dysentery was the most common cause of death. “The certificates in my hand reeked of torment and death,” he said. Then he folded them and went outside to stand in the Kew sunshine.

irishtimes.com

Bangkok dangerous
Dean Williams
February 25, 2012



A testament to literary skill and a vision so skewed it’s glorious. This is destined to be a classic, in any genre

Bangkok at the end of the 23rd century. The world has used up almost all available petroleum reserves. Wars are waged over the last remaining coal fields. Climate change has become irreversible: Mumbai, London and New York are all under water.

All across the globe megacorporations have engineered crops to feed a starving world, but their monopoly means that countries like India, Burma and most of Asia is now owned and run by them. But not Thailand

In a royal decree, Thailand closed its borders and issued an embargo on genetically-engineered food grain. What’s more, it holds one of the world’s last unadulterated seed banks. It is this vault of wealth that AgriGen’s Anderson Lake must find and acquire for his corporate monstrosity. But to do so, he must navigate a city caught up in the crossfire of slum lords, warring ministries, and an epidemic that’s about to shatter the nebulous calm.

The Windup Girl is a cyberpunk masterpiece. You can feel the sweat dripping off your brow as you are harried through the crowded streets of a sweltering city living on borrowed time. You can smell the reek of the slums that live a tenuous existence underneath the shadow of the mammoth sea walls that keep the rising oceans at bay. You can taste the fear in the abandoned skyscrapers that house the illegal immigrants marking time before the dreaded White Shirts knock on their doors to send them back to the global pot of genocide.

Emiko, the Windup Girl herself is a peripheral figure for most of the book. A Japanese genetic creation that gives her all the traits of a pleasure princess, but no ability to reproduce, she becomes, like the glowering orb of a future sun, the beacon to which every other character in the book gravitates.



Paolo Bacigalupi has created a world reminiscent of Philip K. Dick and William Gibson, but he is not an imitator. His future dystopia with environmental calamity waiting around every corner, beasts born from genetic vats, and the stink of humanity is every bit as riveting as theirs.

Bacigalupi thrives on the amorality and extreme apathy of his genre. When Emiko is raped every day for the pleasure of customers at the brothel in which she works, you watch the perversion unfold with the same aloofness that she does. Her lack of humanity makes her sad, but it also reflects the wider malaise of the time. Anderson is the epitome of the megacorporations of the future. His lack of concern for his staff or the Thai people themselves is offset by the love of his company’s vision. The rest of the cast of characters, and there are many, lack any redeeming qualities, and in this lies one of the other successes of the book.

These aren’t science fiction figments cavorting around the universe hoping to spread man’s ideal. These are carnal beasts lusting after riches, revelling in the pleasure of the flesh, and treading over the squalor around them.

The real (anti)hero of the book, however, is Bangkok. Bacigalupi weeps for it, all the while washing it with fetid human waste. The views from the towers and atop the levees offer glimpses of succour, but only fleetingly, before the reader is once again pulled into the cesspool. It is the perfect setting, for a game of cat-and-mouse so vile it makes Machiavelli look like a boy scout.

The Windup Girl is more than just a cyberpunk novel. It is a testament to literary skill and a vision so skewed it’s glorious. This is destined to be a classic, in any genre.

Name: The Windup Girl

Author: Paolo Bacigalupi

Pages: 529pp

Publisher: Hachette India

postnoon.com

Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives
Rodriguez Jr. Jose A (Author), Bill Harlow (Author)



Book Description

Publication Date: April 30, 2012

From a top-level operative in the counterterrorism unit of the CIA comes an explosive memoir about the behind-the-scenes fight against al-Qaeda after September 11.

Since the death of Osama Bin Laden, interest in counterterrorism is at an all-time high. Most people don’t know that Bin Laden’s death is the culmination of years of covert operations and tactics largely overseen by Jose Rodriguez from 2001 to late 2007 and built on by his successors. Like a real-life Jack Bauer from television’s 24, Rodriguez’s sometimes controversial tenure as Chief of the Agency’s Counterterrorism Center involved CIA officers capturing and detaining key senior al-Qaeda operatives and implementing Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, tools which were an integral part of the War on Terror but are no longer available to those fighting America's fiercest foes.

Born in Puerto Rico and raised in Columbia, Bolivia, and the Dominican Republic, Rodriguez shares his unlikely journey from law school student to CIA recruit and finally, at the end of a thirty-one-year career, to being America’s top spy. Rodriguez sparked controversy and a three-year investigation by his decision to order the destruction of videotapes showing CIA officers conducting harsh, but what he describes as “legal, necessary, and effective interrogation.” Riveting and timely, Hard Measures also examines how the current political climate and resulting policies have negatively impacted the CIA’s efficiency—even taking away the mechanisms that made feats like the successful Bin Laden operation possible.

amazon.com

see also : https://teakdoor.com/thailand-and-asi...ml#post2084525 (US admits to torture at secret jail inside Thailand)

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Rotting In The Bangkok Hilton:

The Gruesome True Story of a Man Who Survived Thailand’s Deadliest Prison by T. M. Hoy

Greg Barbrick
Jun 19, 2012

As the title Rotting In The Bangkok Hilton: The Gruesome True Story of a Man Who Survived Thailand’s Deadliest Prison indicates, this book is not for the faint of heart. Author T. M. Hoy made what he now terms “A tragic mistake” in not reporting a murder that a friend of his committed in 1995. For this, he was given a life sentence. Before he was given a treaty-transfer and remanded to a Federal prison in the United States, he spent five years in two Thai prisons, the Chiang Mai Remand, and Bang Kwang.

I guess in a way it was a morbid sense of curiosity that led me to pick this book up, wondering just how bad life in a third-world prison would be. As Hoy describes it, it was sheer hell. I do not think I would have lasted more than six months there.

The book plunges right in to just how bad it was with the first chapter, “My Death Haiku.” The haiku was composed at a point when Hoy had completely given up, and accepted the fact that he would die in the prison. There is no preamble, no “I was framed” excuses; we are instantly put into the mind-set of a man who truly feels as if he will not survive much longer, and there is literally nothing he can do about it.

It is a powerful beginning, but then Hoy describes the Thai prisons in fascinating detail. For one thing, there is the strange class system. At the very lowest end of the spectrum were the “Hill People.” These are Thai peasants whose lives were worth less than nothing. Most are illiterate, poverty-stricken men (the women were housed separately), who were caught as “mules” transporting heroin.

They are offered (what was to them) big money to smuggle the drug out of the Golden Triangle, but these people are completely out of their league in this game. Customs agents spot them as if they had bulls-eyes on their backs. They are nervous, and totally out of place traveling in first-class with their shabby clothes. It sounds as if it were like shooting fish in a barrel for the agents. Inside, the Hill People are treated as literal slaves. Their family has no money to bribe the guards to get them any preferential treatment. So they are assigned the hardest jobs in the prison until they drop dead.

According to Hoy, bribery and graft are the name of the game, and for prisoners who have access to any money, life is a little easier. They are able to purchase edible foods, and other basics. Their existence is slightly mitigated by this, but is by no means pleasant.

Then there is the curious case of whites, either Americans or Europeans. It is a tricky game the Thais play in these situations, because there are embassy officials involved, and the treatment of these prisoners is “supervised” to varying degrees. From Hoy’s account, the fact that there was an element of “accountability” involved is what saved his life. The man from the embassy who oversaw his case would bring him pre-packaged foods and various items, which at least kept him alive.


The prison food was so bad that the huge rat population would not even eat it. The inmates were fed twice a day some rice and “soup.” The rice was boll-weevil infested, and the soup was made out of remnants from a local slaughterhouse that were so hideous I will refrain from even describing it. Allow my previous mention of the fact that rats would not touch it to suffice as explanation of just how decayed and horrid the stuff was. All of the available water was basically untreated sewage.


Add to this the variety of tropical insects that festered in this environment, and you get an idea of how unbearable life must have been. Unless you had the money or the connections to acquire antibiotics, your time in a Thai prison was a slow, torturous death sentence.


Rotting In The Bangkok Hilton is “only” a 200-page book, which I thought would make for a quick read. Not so. I think what I have described so far makes it clear that the circumstances described are as unpleasant as one could possibly imagine. But there is another factor.


T. M. Hoy does not waste words. With almost every sentence, he slams home the points he has to make. The absence of long-winded paragraphs detailing the various situations completely works in this context. It is almost as if one of the most enduring maxims of prison life, “Save your energy,” has been applied to the writing of this book. The text is very tight, very raw, and very real.


After five years, Hoy was miraculously transferred via treaty to Federal prison in the United States, where he served another 11 years before release.


The publication of Rotting In The Bangkok Hilton will probably not change the conditions of Thai prisons, nor was it intended to. But it is without a doubt an eye-opening account of what actually goes on there, and an incredibly absorbing read.

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New-Laid Next Eggs ; New Book Looks at Retiring to Thailand

As retirees grasp the implications of 40% losses to their savings they are becoming more broad-minded about how they'll maintain the lifestyles. The most creative and daring of them are following the globalization trend and outsourcing themselves to exotic locales like Thailand.

July 8, 2012 (FPRC) -- The trickle of retirees moving abroad is becoming a flood. Since the financial crisis retirement assets have fallen 40% and retiree emigration has risen 300%. So retirees with fewer eggs in their nests have are finding new ways to make omelets.

The biggest beneficiary has been Thailand. Western-trained doctor's appointments are $5, complicated dental fillings are $36, apartment rents starting under $80, $2 meals and beers–all combine to relieve new expatriates' financial stress.

Once their stress levels drop they begin to get itchy feet. Tempted by the proximity of the Taj Mahal and the Forbidden City and famously low Asian air fares, their next thought is 'This is too good to miss. How can I afford to take advantage of it?'.

The new book, Making Money in Thailand: A Retiree's Guide, answers that question.

'It's tricky,' says author Godfree Roberts. 'Thai employment laws are strict so we consulted an experienced Thai immigration lawyer. When we dug into the regulations and talked to the Thai Bureau of Immigration we found that there's a surprising range of opportunities. Twenty-three legal job categories, in fact.

The Thai government welcomes investors, for example, and $50,000 is enough to set up a nice restaurant. The government is also begging for people to teach English and is happy to grant employment visas for them. The book covers what retirees need to do to get their English teaching certificates while living in Thailand, and recommends reputable, affordable schools.

There are businesses that don't involve taking jobs from Thais and which bring foreign exchange dollars into Thailand, like exporting Thailand's exotic products around the world. Or organizing tours for special interest groups, like people whose hobby is tie-dying silk.

eBay alone supplements the incomes of hundreds of retirees in Thailand and the government–in the form of the Thai Post Office–does everything it can to simplify and speed sales to their home countries.

Best of all, says Roberts, is the fact that expatriates already have enough to live on. So they're not stressed by the need to reach profitability quickly. 'One of our clients took 14 months of steady effort to build an on-line business. She lost an average of $200 a month during that time–money she could afford thanks to careful budgeting–and turned a life-long hobby into a nice steady business. Today she spends a month at the beach and another month in some exotic South East Asian location'.

THE AUTHOR

A native of Australia, he received his doctorate from the University of Massachusetts and has lived in Japan, the US, the UK, Fiji, New Zealand and Australia.

Author's website: Godfree Roberts Author's Page

Making Money in Thailand: A Retiree's Guide - Making Money in Thailand: A Retiree's Guide (Thailand Retirement): Godfree Roberts: Amazon.com: Kindle Store (Amazon. $9.95)

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