There are two parts of this story, told in the film "The Killing Fields." The story of Dith Pran, who was working as a locally-hired photographer for NY Times reporter Sydney Schanberg at the time of the fall of Phnom Penh to Khmer Rouge troops in 1975, is of a man who manages to survive the horrors of a genocide which was directed by Cambodians toward Cambodians, and resulted in the death of (estimates vary) 1/4 to 1/3 of the country's population in less than four years. Schanberg's story of his own guilt and fear about what had happened to his friend is powerful and disturbing in its own way. This book is essentially the publication in book form of a long article in the New York Times Sunday magazine. You cannot help but be drawn into the story, which is clearly written and, while compassionate, manages to be dispassionate and matter-of-fact, in a way that good journalism can be.

Really is a brilliant gem this book; Bahu's style speaks for itself, completely lucid and absolutely no beating around the bush! This man defies our geneartions description of greatness, he transcends it, which is probable given his closeness to God; and God, transcends description, God is "the perfect balance, ever at peace, ever the same, man cals it God, even thogh it is too wondrous to be named, yet holy is its name and holy the tongue that keeps it holy" -Mirdad this is what Bahu seeks to convey, throught he medium of Love, and wonderfully powerful is his love for the lord, has to be read to be beleived. Elias does an excellent job of bringing the urdu meaning of Bahu brillinace across to english readers. A very very satisfying read, a book to be cherished and pased on for generations.

This book has great chapter titles, and 80 pages of notes.

There are a lot of questions in this book are about death. While President Kennedy was alive, it was not obvious that Vietnam was going to be part of the world in which so many Americans would die. The insignificance of the problem at the time Kennedy took office might be guessed from such assessments as, "Interrogations of captured Vietcong cadres showed them to be well trained and brought in, across the seventeenth parallel, or through Laos and Cambodia. The total Vietcong in central Vietnam had grown from a thousand at the end of 1959 to five times that number by mid-1961." (p. 102). President Kennedy had authorized an increase in American troops that jumped from hundreds to thousands as the years went by, but with little sign that, merely seven years after JFK took office, more than a thousand troops per week on each side might be losing their lives in Nam early in 1968.

As a professor in history with a year off from teaching, Howard Jones had the opportunity to examine documentary sources and the Oral History Interviews at presidential libraries, and he even talked to a few of the remaining participants. Daniel Ellsberg is not a major character in this book, though Jones talked to him on March 27, 2002, concerning a meeting in which President Kennedy asked Lansdale about getting rid of The Nhus, "But if that didn't work out--or I changed my mind and decided to get rid of Diem--would you be able to go along with that?" Lansdale ended up in a limousine with Robert McNamara after the meeting, where McNamara told him, "When he asks you to do something, you don't tell him you won't do it." (p. 365). Actually, the source of this story is a book by A. J. Langguth, a New York Times correspondent in South Vietnam who claimed "Ellsberg's unpublished memoir, Langguth asserted, contained this account of Lansdale's clandestine meeting with the president." (p. 365). "Ellsberg likewise considers the story valid. But in an interview of McNamara conducted by Langguth years afterward, the former secretary alleged that he did not recall the meeting." (pp. 365-366). I checked the index of SECRETS by Daniel Ellsberg, finally published in October, 2002, and found no mention of President Kennedy on the pages of the only entry for "Lansdale, Edward G.: McNamara's meeting with," though it included a page on which "high Vietnamese officials who met with General Lansdale regarded him warily but with awe because of his reputation as a kingmaker. They assumed he was there to pick the next Diem." By the time Ellsberg was on the Lansdale team, LBJ was president, Diem and Nhu were dead, and the Vietnamese could only hope that another government like Diem's would be better than a bunch of generals.

America clearly considered a coup against Diem at a time when it was trying to be as neutral as possible, because Diem could have asked American diplomats to leave Nam if he had any evidence that the Americans were actively engaging in plots against a government that it was supposed to be supporting. The index is good at sorting out who was involved, though it isn't until page 280 that Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., a brigadier general in the Army Reserves who spent 1962 writing policy papers on Vietnam, was given the opportunity to become the American ambassador to Saigon. In the photo section, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson's trip to Saigon on May 12, 1961, established that Frederick Nolting was ambassador then. President Kennedy is shown talking with Henry Cabot Lodge on August 15, 1963, just a few weeks before JFK's CBS television broadcast with Walter Cronkite on September 2, 1963. As usual, "Lodge's appointment, the Kennedy administration insisted, ensured bipartisan support for its Vietnam policy. These statements were true, but they did not reflect reality. The White House believed that Nolting had become too close to Diem," (p. 281). The note supporting this information adds, "Nolting learned of his removal over radio while on vacation." (p. 501).

While this is a history of policy that led to the Vietnam war, there is little sense that any possibility, other than a result which might be considered a victory for American policy, was ever considered. The only use that the Vietnamese had for the Americans was for creating the illusion that somehow America could win a war there. By September 18, 1963, Lodge was trying to get Nhu to leave the country, and reporting back to Washington, "one feels sorry for him. He is wound up as tight as a wire. He appears to be a lost soul, a haunted man who is caught in a vicious circle. The Furies are after him." (p. 371).

This is history on an emotional level. I have no doubt that Jack Ruby pulled the trigger of the pistol that shot Lee Harvey Oswald in the stomach, resulting in Oswald's death, and it might have been because of a cancer that would take the life of Jack Ruby before the end of the 1960s, when we had learned enough from Lenny Bruce to let just about anybody swear, if they felt like it. For President Kennedy to remain on good relations with the C.I.A., after news started coming in on how bad the situation in Nam really was, is like expecting Americans to believe that Ruby and Oswald were friends, or even knew each other. Oswald and Ruby do not appear in this book. For that side of the story, see OSWALD TALKED by La Fontaine. This book has no news on who took part in the JFK assassination, which is officially still more of a mystery than anything that happened in Nam.

The Vietnam War was a product of the Cold War, that great conflict between titan powers that was spawned by the nuclear age and that dominated foreign diplomacy for decades. It was capitalism versus communism and democracy versus autocracy. The conflict raged not only in the battlefields of Vietnam, but also in the homeland, where the war took the center stage of a cultural and social revolution. In all of the commotion and of all the debate, the war, at the field level, became a product of the political chaos that characterized America during that period. Washington, who scrambled for a policy that worked, that appeased the nation, that placated the growing upheaval, in the end never found it. Its failure to do so produced the only solution that was politically viable albeit immoral: get out anyway you can, but by golly DO GET OUT! This is what Decent Interval is about.

Decent Interval is Frank Snepp's first hand account of the immoral exit the United States made from Vietnam in 1975. Aside from the issues concerning the righteousness of the war, of lost American lives, of a nation grown weary, and of the social/cultural revolution it became a part of, the fact is, that nevertheless, we were there, and we made commitments. And although making the exit may very well have been the right thing to do, the way we left violated the principles that make up the character of our nation. We failed to live up to the very values that we usually identify as American, or at least those values that we like to believe we possess. We value human life. We value freedom. We value honesty. And most of all we value being recognized as champions of all of that. We love that image of America. In Decent Interval we learn that America's darkest hour in Vietnam did not occur during the war. Instead, our worst folly came in the end. We bungled everything from leaving behind a huge arsenal for the enemy, to turning our backs on thousands of people who were loyal to America, who trusted us, who knew our values, and never in their wildest dreams did they imagine that their service to us would be repaid with deception and abandonment.

Decent Interval is not a partisan view in the traditional Pro-war/Anti-war sense. Rather it's a factual account of events as seen through Snepp's eyes. Snepp was a CIA analyst in Saigon, and some have labeled Decent Interval as a whistle blow, but in actuality, the fact that our involvement in Vietnam was full of bureaucratic incompetence and ineptitude, was no secret. Snepp simply gave us the details. .

Decent Interval is an excellent read. It epitomizes everything that went wrong in Vietnam. It illustrates the limits of our political power in the face of an increasingly anxious electorate, and how political survivability took precedence over what would otherwise have been considered the "right thing to do."

In "Deerskins and Duffels", Kathryn Holland Braund provides a scholarly and easily readable study of the dynamics of the trade relationship between the English and the Creek Indian Nation. Braund delivers a good overview of the history of the Anglo-Creek trade; from its introduction in the late 17th century, how it triumphed against its competitors France and Spain in the 18th century, and its conclusion in the early 19th century with the removal of the Creeks by the American government. Importantly, the book shows how that both the British and the Creeks benefitted from their trade relationship. South Carolina and Georgia owe their colony's success to the economic windfall of the trade. The trade enabled the Creeks to become the preeminent Indian nation of the Southeast at the, sometimes, catastrophic cost of neighboring tribes. "Deerskins and Duffels" gives an interesting look into the life and activities of the frontier indian trader. However, he book's greatest value is its well-researched examination of the Creeks as consumers and how the Nation's demand for trade goods caused them to create a massive commercial deer harvesting enterprise. Braund has written a fully documented textbook on the subject of Anglo-Creek trade, but she has relayed the information in such a way that both the scholar and the casual reader will be well satisfied for having read it.

This is history they didn't teach us in school! Jan Krancher has compiled 24 personal accounts from survivors of a brutal -and nearly forgotten- episode of World War II: the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies and imprisonment of thousands of its people. This 3 1/2 year occupation was immediately followed by a bloody revolution and the creation of modern Indonesia.

These deeply moving stories, from civilian internees (including children) and military POW's, give the English-speaking reader a glimpse of what has been called the "other Holocaust", the brutalities of the Pacific War. You won't forget them.

If you liked the film "Paradise Road", you won't want to miss this book.

Development and Challenge : Southeast Asia in the New Millennium is an excellent piece of research collections. Editors have done a great job by putting together a variety of research articles covering an array of areas.

This book is enormousely important for students, researchers and someone with an interest in the region.

I definitely recommend this book for all.

I've never been sure whether this was a cookbook, a travel book, or a wonderful life narrative. Or, I'm sure it's all of the above. If you love life and you love food and you love people, you have to have this.

And you really can omit the fire ants without damaging the recipe...

We took Tim's advice to heart, and spent a great month in Bali. We toured the island anti-clockwise and dove and photographed all the sites Tim highlighted. We dove with the operators he suggested, as well as some others, and found that his suggestions were always always best.

We used this book during our recent trip to the Seychelles. It was thorough and guided us to colorful reefs and the descriptions of dive sites were better in real life than the book described ! Fantastic guide.