The book starts with a section on Thai place names and has sections on Thai names and food. Why they are in here I do not know other than to practice your Thai reading. They take up valuale space.

There is a little grammar follwed by excercises, but I could have done with more grammar. It's typically Thai - half done.

This is a follow up book to "Thai for Elementary Learners", though how you go from elementary to intermediate in one step I don't know. You don't in learning English.

That said it is one of the better books around. But I'd love a good one.

There are not many textbooks for the intermediate Thai student, so it's our good luck that this is a good one. Ajaan Becker has lessons on most of the really puzzling idiomatic usages of the language, such as "^hay" (to give, basically, but lots of other things, like "~phom ja tham ^hay"), "gaan", "khwaam," and many other useful things including the all important particles such as 'na and ^na. There is a list of all the 76 provinces of Thailand, which is very useful. A suggestion for future editions: associate the list of provinces with a map or maps of Thailand. Another very good aspect of this intermediate book is that it strongly encourages you to make the leap from Thai in transliteration to Thai in Thai script. Another tool you might consider if you are serious about learning Thai is the Linguaphone Thai Course. It's always good to surround yourself with lots of Thai-learning materials in any case. Highly recommended!

Once again, Benjawan Becker has written a great book on reading, writing, speaking and comprehending the Thai language. Lists of streets, provinces and names provide great references, and are taught in the context of conversations. Emphasis is placed on learning to give and take directions, hold conversations, and express impressions and emotions. Altogether a natural and beneficial follow up on her first book. Highly recommended for anyone serious about learning the mechanics of the Thai language.

Just finished reading this book and found the portion
debunking JFK idolators' revisionist history to be well done,
although rather long winded. The rest of the book is pure paranoia - I was alive during the Vietnam buildup and well remember the motives that led to intervention. Surprisingly,
Chomsky attributes dark motives to practically everything
the US did during those times, and virtually never touches on the motives most often at play - the defeat and containment of Communism, which at times looked as though it was going to win.
Chomsky seems to think that Communism was essentially just a sort of ultra socialism. That is his biggest error in the book:
a severe naivete about what Communism was and why much was sacrificed to ensure that it didn't envelope the planet. In other words, he displays an extreme case of tunnel vision.

What is missing from Chomsky's book is the notion that if anyone told JFK right to his face precisely what the United States was going to do in Nam for the following ten years (I think George Ball tried to do this), the president himself wouldn't have believed it, and could have told him, "You're crazy . . . " (as I remember this, the president expressed himself with an expletive) and really meant it. Anyone who thinks that American policy in Vietnam ever made sense is underestimating the ability of the government to lie whenever it is trying to picture what its national honor adds up to in evens and odds. I knew that something was crazy when I read in Rethinking Camelot that John Newman had written a letter to "The Nation" in which he said, "Let's get serious." Actually, the policy always begged to be compared with some outrageous joke, and "The Nation" has been great at coming up with jokes (I have even read the admission by Calvin Trillin that he used jokes in his column) to match such situations. Possibly the funniest thing that I ever read just showed up again in the April 10, 2000 issue of "The Nation," in a book review by John Leonard. "It's worth recalling that when Freud finally got permission to leave Vienna in 1938, the Gestapo obliged him to sign a certificate saying that he had been well treated by the authorities. He added a sentence of his own: 'I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone.'" (p. 26) American policy in Vietnam was always a dream of imposing that kind of order in a country in which a majority of the people were not Americans, and might even try to kill Americans, if you want to know the truth. I can name one Kennedy adviser who was willing to tell LBJ in November, 1965, that the odds were about even that things were getting worse in Vietnam, and were going to get a lot worse as the plans at that stage were implemented, but he wouldn't have even been keeping his job if he told everybody what he thought. I'm actually glad McNamara didn't resign in protest, because he knew that other people could do his job worse than he could, and he was willing to sacrifice himself to save the country from the kind of stupidity that was assumed for anyone in his position, of which he was highly aware.

Excellent overview of the relationship between American political/corporate culture and the origens of the Vietnam War. In this case, Chomsky looks at the historical revisionism that clouded the discourse on the assassination of JFK. The book does not debunk the notion that a conspiracy in Dallas occurred; rather the emphasis is on how JFK simply continued (and, in some cases,expanded) the basic thrust of American foreign policy. Using mostly the internal record, Chomsky details JFK and his virulent hawkish and anti-communist ideology, a fact which Camelot propogandists attempt to hide or minimize. Once again, the point is to highlight the reality: a single political party exists today to do the bidding for the corporate sector (of which the military-industrial complex is a large component). Remember, JFK had increased defense spending and forced through a great deal of pro-corporate legislation (while also dragging his heels on Civil Rights legislation and scolding the Warren Court for its progressive leanings) prior to the assassination. All in all, another worthy contribution from one of the great American intellectuals of the 20th century.

The first 5 or 6 Chapters are very useful for the Beginner but afterwards it becames increasingly difficult. It hard to understand the explanations on more advance grammar. I think that unnecesarilly tries to explain many concepts instead of teaching the howto of the language as in the first part. I think I should be reworked (at least the last part) in order to make the student to be able to use the grammar at least for some basic reading. I think I should include more practical examples of reading and interpreting texts. Vocabulary alone is not enough. So I guess that considering the few book about this subject this is a good one after all despite the shortcomings.

I am less enthused about this massive tome than the other reviewers. I have a feeling that the book has failed to make the transition from a very lively university course to a textbook. The approach using all the different 'dimensions' is rather idiosyncratic. There problem is that there are few other choices when it comes to Tibetan textbooks. There is a heavy reliance for examples on the literature of logic. In my opinion more examples from practice-related material would have been useful. Too much reliance is placed on traditional Tibetan grammar for my liking. And that romanisation is unnecessarily complex. Still, it is a very significant work, and inspite of its short-comings, is still the best in this small field.

Very useful book for learners with a constructive introduction to Tibetan sentence structure and a useful basic vocabulary for classical Tibetan. Start with this book if you want to learn to read Tibetan and get a good basis. With the next edition please give us a lighter version an add an index!

If there is ever a study of all the shameful efforts to belittle the crimes of communism, this book will occupy a prominent place. Vickery claims that there were only 740,000 deaths under the Khmer Rouge during 1975-9. How does he reach this number, which is half the size of other estimates and only a third of the true figure? He combines a low population count of 7.1 million in 1975 with a massively inflated sum of 6.7 million in 1979, producing a demographic decline of only 400,000. No credible source has given such a drastic underestimate.

In the 15 years since this book was first published, Vickery has made no effort to include the demographic studies which refute his conclusions. He has nothing to say about Marek Sliwinski's analysis, which calculates losses of 1.9-2.5 million, most likely 2.16 million ("Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique," p40). He has nothing to say about the Documentation Center of Cambodia, which has shown that 1.5 million were massacred and 2-3 million killed overall (Craig Etcheson, "Quantifying Crimes Against Humanity in Cambodia," online). In short, this new edition contains nothing to inform the reader that Vickery's claims are indefensible.

Vickery derides what he calls the "Standard Total View" of Cambodia, namely the assumption that the Khmer Rouge carried out a systematic campaign of genocide in pursuance of their fanatical Marxist ideology. In place of the Standard Total View, he claims that the Khmer Rouge leadership "did not foresee, let alone plan," the bloodbath which they inflicted: "They were petty bourgeois radicals overcome by peasantist romanticism" (p287). His conclusion is based on oral testimony gathered from 92 Cambodian refugees in a Thai refugee camp during 1980. Only nine of these interviewees are women and just one is a peasant. Given that the book purports to explain the motives and conduct of the Cambodian peasants, this is a shocking lapse from accepted standards of scholarship.

Unfortunately for Vickery's position, the Standard Total View is clearly correct. Had Vickery devoted space to Lenin's misnamed policy of War Communism, he would have been able to cite the research of numerous economic historians (e.g. Boris Brutzkus, Lancelot Lawton, Alexander Baykov, T.J.B. Hoff) who agree that it was a conscious effort to eliminate the market economy, resulting in a famine which killed 5 million people. Had Vickery explored other examples - such as Mao's Great Leap Forward, in which 30 million died (Jasper Becker, "Hungry Ghosts") - he could have explained why the Khmer Rouge described their plan as the "Super Great Leap Forward" (Tung Padevat, June 1976). He might have seen that the division of the population into class categories - some of which are targeted for destruction - is consistent with other Marxist revolutions and cannot be attributed to peasant populism. But research of this kind can hardly be expected in a work of political dogma.

Vickery is so determined to absolve communism that he even considers it "fortunate" that "those who predicted a predominance of agrarian nationalism over Marxism in China and Vietnam were mistaken" (p290). He does not mention that the good fortune of the Chinese people includes the slaughter of tens of millions through massacre, slavery and forced famine (Washington Post, July 17-18, 1994). Nor does he inform his readers that North Vietnam massacred 50,000-100,000 before reunification, with 300,000-500,000 starved to death (Robert F. Turner, "Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development," pp142-4); or that its post-war crimes included the massacre of 100,000 South Vietnamese civilians (Jacqueline Desbarats, "Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam," online); the murder of 165,000 in concentration camps (Orange County Register, April 29, 2001); and the mass expulsions which drowned 500,000 boat people (Louis Wiesner, "Victims and Survivors: Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Vietnam, 1954-1975," p344). The facts being inconvenient, Vickery simply deletes them from history.

Those who wish to read a discussion of the Khmer Rouge period by responsible experts should consult Craig Etcheson, "The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea;" Karl D Jackson, ed., "Cambodia, 1975-1978: Rendezvous With Death" or Jean-Louis Margolin, "Cambodia: The Country of Disconcerting Crimes" in Stephane Courtois, ed., "The Black Book of Communism" (pp577-636). The history of scholarly apologetics on this subject is discussed in Sophal Ear's online thesis, "The Khmer Rouge Canon: 1975-1979 - The Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia."

I read a number of books, trying to understand what Pol Pot was all about. Most make him out to be satan incarnate, or otherwise incomprehensible. This is the one book that made the history of his regime reasonably comprehensible to me. Highest recommendation.

Michael Vickery, always ready and perhaps even ever-anxious to attack anyone else who has studied Cambodia, shares some unique insights and valuable experience gained in Cambodia in the 1960s. While most of the arguments about the goings on inside Cambodia during the DK and PRK eras are now dated, readers can still learn much from "Cambodia 1975-1982". Early into this book, Vickery very cleverly uses passages from Bun Chan Mol's excellent book "Chareut Khmer" to catch off guard those readers who assume crimes against humanity in Cambodia began in the DK era. That passage alone makes the book worthwhile.

I'm from Penang and I got this book for my American husband for our second trip back to Malaysia. The first thing that made me suspicious of its credibility was the cover photo. What is described as the "durian at the market" looks much more like a pile of nangka (jackfruit). Content-wise, I found some odd phrases in the book. "Plain water" is translated as "air putih" instead of "air kosong", "corner" becomes "pojok", which I have never heard of. "Sudut" would have made more sense to me. "Punggung" translates into "back" (anatomically), which I believe is correct in Indonesian, but would have made many Malaysians I know snicker at the reference to one's rear end. Perhaps these words are more common in parts of Malaysia I am not familiar with such as the east coast or Sabah & Sarawak. If this is the case, it would have been nice to have more than one translation for a word, although probably not practical for a quick reference guide.

In any case, Malaysians are easily impressed with foreigners who speak Malay, so while I may find fault with it, there is much in this little book which visitors would find useful. I particularly like the little tips on Malaysian culture, grammar and food. For those who plan to stay awhile, try the book-and-tapes combo of Survival Malay, and for cultural insight, Heidi Munan's Culture Shock! is a delight even for homesick Malaysians.

This book is extremely useful especially if you are outside the main cities such as Malacca or Kuala Lumpur. Malay people are very self effacing and your use of the phrases in this book will really open doors. Also, the social interaction hints to proper behavior are very good and useful too.

I got this phrasebook as a gift. I was skeptical at first because of its child-like appearance, but once I started looking through it I found it to be amazing. No other Malay book has the detail that this one does. With short paragraphs at the beginnings of each section, it ensures the best understanding of the culture. The authors are very knowledgeable and knows their Malay. I would recommend this reference book to anyone who is even considering a trip to Malaysia or is interested in the culture.

Linguists (especially English-speaking ones) would do well to look to the Japanese language and test their theories against it *first* before making o'erhasty generalizations about language. I turned to this book after reading Anna Wierzbicka's work on 'semantic universals' and found that it validated my ideas that there is no exact equivalent in the Japanese language for the English word 'you' (or 'Du' in German, 'tu' in French, etc.). However, Shibatani's work is enjoyable and very informative. Non-linguists can (I think) understand it without much difficulty, and students of Japanese (as well as native speakers!) may enjoy his overview of the history and development of the language. He also goes out of his way to disprove certain 'myths' about Japanese. Plus it has a bibliography of works in both Japanese and English.

I sincerely hope more books of this kind will emerge.

Shibatani's book "the Languages of Japan" is now 10 years old, but it still proves to be an excellent resource not only for the weathered linguist, but for anyone with any interest in Japanese, Ainu, and their various dialects.

This edition gives a concise overview of Ainu and Japanese from phoentics to semantics and more. I found the chapter on Japanese dialects especially fascinating, and the first half of the book that is dedicated to Ainu is one of the most comprehensive modern works on the language of Japan's indigineous peoples.

This volume is small and thus limited in its content, but overall it still remains a valuable and excellent resource for linguists and language buffs.

The author was a college student when the communists invaded Saigon and sent him to a reeducation camp. He was neither a politician nor a military man.

There he witnessed the cruelty of the wardens who starved, beat, and killed prisoners whenever they liked it. He was able to escape from the camp while accompanying an injured Viet Cong cadre to the hospital. He escaped to Thailand by boat and went on to graduate from Bennington College and Brown University after flipping burgers for some time.

This memoir describes the events from the time he was a highschooler in Vietnam until his enrollment at Bennington College. The resilience and courage of the author could only equal his academic success and his lyric prose.

This is a powerful story of survival and eventually escape from the jungle re-education camps of post-war Viet Nam.

See, perhaps for the first time, the untold side of this tragic piece of history. Huynh's prose is precise and poetic, at times transcending the brutal realism of the story in order to reach the spiritual core that held him together through his experience.

This is an important book for anyone who is interested in this time period, and more importantly, where we, the US and Viet Nam, will go from here.

I had "The Unofficial Guide to Florida with Kids" and found it to be extremely useful. Since we were planning a trip to SC, I decided to buy this book. Unfortunately, the area we were planning on visiting (Hilton Head) was not included in this book.
Of course, they can't cover every area when the book is for the entire Southeast, I should have looked at it at the bookstore first. If you are undecided on where you are travelling in the SE, this book is for you, it's very informative on many of the major areas, with great ratings on different restaurants and tourist spots.

I like traveling with my children, but I admit there are times when it's more work than pleasure. I read several guides when planning a trip to Louisiana, but this one had the most kid-friendly information of them all. And it wasn't just of interest to kids -- I found lots of neat events and places that weren't mentioned in other guides my husband and I enjoyed as well.

You don't have to just hike the Appalacian trail if you visit the Smokey Mountain National Park....and this book proves it. Packed with information about the parks and it's trails and non-trail hiking, it's a good book to pack for that vacation you are taking to the area. For day hikes, overnight hikes, or thru hikes of the area, this is a good resource.

The book, "The Singapore Dilemma", written by Malay academic Lily Zubaidah Rahim can be summed up in three sentences:

1)The Malays are marginalised in Singapore society. 2)The marginalisation is not their fault. 3)There is no meritocracy in Singapore.

The Malays are a minority group in Singapore with about 14% of the population. The other groups are Chinese (77%), Indian (7%) and others (2%).

The author is trying to make the case that the Malays are poorer and less educated than the Chinese because of racial discrimination in a Chinese dominated society and not because of the Malay's cultural characteristics (or what she calls the cultural deficit theory). This theory posits that Malays are lacking in ambition and diligence. She also challenges the widely held view that Singapore practices meritocracy in that one's place in society is achieved by merit.

This is not surprising since she believes that their relative poverty is entirely not their fault. If Singapore is a true meritocracy then of course, the Malay's relative poverty must be their own fault.

Besides blaming the Chinese dominated government, she also blames the previous British colonial administration that left nearly half a century ago. For instance, she blamed 19th century British administrators for not providing Malays with education because they thought that the Malays at that time to be disinterested.

She also blamed colonial policies discouraging Malays from growing cash crops. The author reminds me of some African intellectuals blaming European colonial rule for their poverty even though the colonialists left half a century ago.

While she could successfully cite instances of discrimination in government policies, I feel that she has not made a sufficient case that their lower incomes and educational levels are entirely other people's fault.

To do so she must explain the questions raised by even a casual reader of her book. For instance, how could she account for the fact that the other minorities, the Indians and those in the "Others" categories did much better than Malays?

According to her book, the average monthly head-of-household incomes in 1990 for the Chinese, Malays, Indians and Others were $3,213, $2,246, $2,859 and $3,885 respectively.

She was fond of writing the phrase, "the Malays and other minorities", in the book as though all minorities are in the same boat. But the statistics in her own book expose this untruth. The Indians in 1990 were only slightly behind the Chinese and those in the "Others" category were actually ahead!

There was no attempt to explain this anomaly. If Singapore's educational and other policies favour the majority Chinese, how does she explain the relative success of the other minorities?

She also did not give sufficient airing of the views of her fellow Malays who agree with the cultural deficit theory. To her credit, she did mention their names but only very quickly in passing. The author obviously did not want to dwell too long on this topic.

Some of these Malays who agree that it was their own cultural characteristics that held them back have spent their entire adult lives trying to uplift the Malays. Again to her credit, she did mention a notable book written by one such Malay. The book is called, "The Malay Dilemma" (notice the similarity with the name of her book?). It was written by Dr Mahathir Mohammed who is today the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Singapore's closest neighbour.

In fact, the Malays in Malaysia insist on special priveleges because they acknowledge that the cannot compete in a level playing field with the Indians and Chinese. This is an implicit acceptance of the cultural deficit theory. For example, there is a mininum quota for Malays at Malaysian Universities. A Chinese with better grades must make way for Malays with lower grades in order to fill the quota of Malay students.

Malaysia is a mirror image of Singapore. The Chinese there are a minority while the Malays are the majority group. Malays in Malaysia are also poorer and less educated than the Chinese too, even though they enjoy political power. This fact must be explained for the author to prove her case that Malays' lower income and education is everybody else's fault other than their own.

She complained of the promotion of the use of the Chinese language in Singapore. This, she believes puts Malays at a disadvantage and held them back. To the author, this is an example of the race-based policies by the Singapore government elected by a mainly Chinese electorate. Does this strike even a casual reader as odd?

Does the US government (or for that matter the British or Australian governments) need to promote the use of English? Why would a Chinese dominated society need to promote the use of Chinese? What the author (conveniently) forgot to mention is that Singapore is the only country in the world where the majority race, the Chinese, gave up their language for a foreign language, English, in large part to provide a more level playing field for the minorities.

If the staff, customers and suppliers of your company all prefer to communicate in Chinese, it is tough for Malays to get a job. At the time of independence most Chinese in Singapore spoke Chinese in their offices and workplaces. But in part to give minorities a more level playing field and partly for fear of communism, the government quickly made English the main language at great political cost.

Today, the language of commerce and administration in Singapore is English even though many small and medium sized companies still use Chinese. Many Chinese today actually speak English better than Chinese. I am one of them.

This has alienate many older Chinese voters who attended Chinese schools in their youth. Therefore to appease this still significant but diminishing group of voters, the ruling party occassionlly bangs the Chinese drum. But English remains the main language in Singapore.

Of course in Malaysia, the Malays (which comprise 55% of the population as compared to 77% Chinese in Singapore) insist that Malay be the main language.

Other complaints the author made are that Singapore's Armed Forces and immigration policies discriminate against the Malays. Malays are not assigned to sensitive positions in the military and for a long time were not called up to do National Service. She sees this as another instance of discrimination that is the cause of the marginalisation of the Malays.

Singapore's defense and immigration policies must be seen in the context that Singapore is a small rich mainly Chinese city-state surrounded by larger, poorer Malay dominated neighbors. Not so long ago, Chinese people were killed and Chinese women raped during ethnic rioting in neighbouring Indonesia, the largest part of the authour's beloved Nusantara (Malay World). The Indonesian military is also believed to be behind the destruction of East Timor.

Over in Malaysia, the Islamic party, PAS (Malays are wholly Muslims) is gaining ground.They want to create an Islamic state. All these events do not inspire a feeling of security among Singapore's Chinese.

Reading her book, a reader unfamiliar with Singapore may get the impression that Malays in Singapore are getting a sub-standard 3rd world education. She spent a good part of her book criticizing Singapore's educational policies which she believes caters to Chinese interests and has disadvantaged the Malay community. Actually, this is not true.

In internationally conducted Mathematics and Science test of 41 advanced (mostly OECD) countries, Singapore students topped both subjects in 1995 and came in 1st and 2nd in 2000. Malay Singaporean students did well, beating students from many First World countries. They certainly beat their counterparts from Malaysia who participated in 2000.

I could go on. But I will end here. Her book did write some truth but it was not the whole truth. What the author omitted distorted the truth. Why did she write this flawed book? I suspect the answer can be found in the Preface of her book. She wrote that when she was growing up, she found it hard to accept the "prevailing culturalist view that Malays were not sufficiently hardworking, motivated, industrious".

She further wrote, "Accepting this prevailing view also meant that I, as a Malay from a supposedly deficient cultural tradition, would then also have to accept that I possessed these unflattering attributes."

From this, I deduce that the thought of many people {which by her own admission includes some Malays) believing in the cultural deficit theory is very painful for her. Coming to terms with this is the dilemma she is facing. The book should therefore be more aptly named, "Lily Zubaidah Rahim's dilemma."

While some facts/evidence used by the author are outdated or have become irrelevant, the key insights and analyses wihin are plausible.
It is particularly refreshing because of extensive fieldwork done and intelligent alternatives offered for the issue of the Malay minority in Singapore.
This book will stimulate critical discussion for the reader familiar with Singapore politics.

I bought this book several weeks ago and was pleasantly surprised by the concise and accurate manner by which Rahim exposed the Lee Kuan Yew and his political mafia. The present political regime in Singapore is blatantly racist and in too many cases unashamedly so. And despite this, many people unwittingly accept Singapore as a good example of meritoracy at work. This book proves that it is not. The PAP government manipulates and isolates people to help fragment public opinion. By racialising all socio, poltical and especially economic issues, Lee Kuan Yew and his PAP lap dogs isolate public opinion for their own political ends. Rahim should be commended for a much needed expose on a little studied area.