Showing 1-10 of 52 results
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Judging by the cover
Life, Chris Baker, Published on 02/09/2022
» We first published A History Of Thailand in 2005, 17 years ago. We have just prepared a fourth edition, adding a new chapter on the extraordinary events since 2005, and over 200 other changes based on new research, mostly by Thai historians. We needed a new cover to signal that this edition is really different.
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Death by a thousand cuts
Life, Chris Baker, Published on 09/07/2021
» The film director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, is the most celebrated Thai creative artist in the world today, awarded the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2010 and a string of other international prizes. After wrestling with the Thai censors, he decided first to stop showing his films in Thailand, and then to stop making his films here. He has recently been making a film with an international star cast in Colombia, almost exactly the opposite point on the globe, the farthest possible distance from Thailand on the planet.
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From prostration to prostration
Life, Chris Baker, Published on 05/03/2021
» After leading a coup in 2014, Gen Prayut Chan-o-cha announced a code of "Twelve Thai Values", telling people how to think and behave. It is difficult to imagine Angela Merkel announcing "Twelve German Values", or even Narendra Modi announcing "Twelve Indian Values". Since the mid-19th century, there have been lots of Thai manuals about proper body language and oral language in social encounters. These books tell a story about power and hierarchy that Patrick Jory narrates in fascinating detail.
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Turning cheeks and pages
Life, Chris Baker, Published on 06/09/2018
» Egyptian mummies who come to life as sexy nymphets. Thai princes driving fast cars. A Thai superwoman who casually murders several husbands. Starlets touting breast-enhancement techniques. For a book about "nationalism and identity in modern Thai literature", this volume has a few surprises.
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Respected Southeast Asian history scholar, Michael Vickery, dies
Life, Chris Baker, Published on 07/07/2017
» With the death of Michael Vickery in Battambang, Cambodia last Thursday, Southeast Asian history lost a giant.
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The romance of the Siamese war elephant
Life, Chris Baker, Published on 03/03/2017
» 'Some so superb surpass a city's worth."
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Saving the Fort Mahakan community
Life, Chris Baker, Published on 11/04/2016
» Last week, the Bangkok Metropolitan Authority (BMA) posted an order to evict the residents of the Fort Mahakan community within a matter of days. Immediately, journalists, activists, academics, and town planners rose in protest, condemning the BMA as philistine wreckers of a small but important part of Bangkok's battered heritage.
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Retelling a great Lao-Thai tale
Life, Chris Baker, Published on 22/02/2016
» Sinxay is a story which appears in slightly different versions with slightly different names in Mon, Thai, Lao and Khmer. The plot is a classic quest in which a hero prince is banished by the machinations of evil siblings, travels long through forest and mountain, defeats many fearsome enemies, and is eventually celebrated in a great homecoming. Old versions were written in verse for recitation at festivals. Key scenes were popular with artists painting temple murals. During the nationalist era in the 1940s, the great littérateur of Laos, Maha Sila Viravong, began a prose version in a conscious attempt to create a Lao national literature. More recently, Sinxay has been celebrated as a kind of national hero in Laos. In 2005, Khon Kaen municipality adopted Sinxay as symbol of the city, and characters from the tale sprouted on the peaks of the city's lamp posts.
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From the field to the protest
Life, Chris Baker, Published on 21/09/2015
» The Thai music known as luk thung (son of the field) is difficult to define because it borrows from everywhere and evolves over time. To the ear, however, it is unmistakable. That's a result of its two dominant rhythms, one from Thai folk music, the other from Latin America and an undercurrent of melancholy from the genre's archetypal song about the country boy far from home thinking of the village and the girl back there. Ethnomusicologist James Mitchell defines it simply as "Thailand's most popular music".
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Bringing the birth stories to life
Life, Chris Baker, Published on 12/10/2015
» The jataka tales or birth stories are the most vivid and accessible part of Buddhist teaching. The Buddha, once he gained the ability to recall his past lives, related all 550 of them to the monks in his following. In some lives, he was a king, some a hermit, some a pauper, and in a few an animal. The 10 longest of these tales became associated with his 10 last lives and with his attainment of the "perfections" that enabled him to be born as the historical Buddha. In this book, this Great Ten have been translated anew for the first time in over a century.
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