The Embassy of Cambodia

The Embassy of Cambodia PDF Author: Zadie Smith
Publisher: Penguin Books Limited
ISBN: 9780241146521
Category : Diplomatic and consular service, Cambodian
Languages : en
Pages : 69

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Book Description
A rare and brilliant story from Zadie Smith, taking us deep into the life of a young woman, Fatou, domestic servant to the Derawals and escapee from one set of hardships to another. Beginning and ending outside the Embassy of Cambodia, which happens to be located in Willesden, NW London, Zadie Smith's absorbing, moving and wryly observed story suggests how the apparently small things in an ordinary life always raise larger, more extraordinary questions. 'It's scale is superficially small, but its range is lightly immense; in the first couple of pages, the world from Ghana to London to Cambodia enters. It is a fiction of consequences both global and heartrenchingly intimate. This voice is global, plural and local, with a delicate grip on historic consequences...... Works on an awesomely global scale, and the relations of slavery and mastership are traced in both personal and international scale.' Philip Hensher, The Guardian 'Reading it is a bit like having a starter in a restaurant that is so good you wish you had ordered a big portion as a main course, only to realise, as you finish it, that it was exactly the right amount.' 'A perfect stocking-filler of a book that shows that short-form fiction can be as vibrant and as healthy as any densely realised full-length novel.' Louise Doughty, The Observer 'Smith serves up a smasher.' Leyla Sanai, The Independent On Sunday

The Embassy of Cambodia

The Embassy of Cambodia PDF Author: Zadie Smith
Publisher: Penguin Books Limited
ISBN: 9780241146521
Category : Diplomatic and consular service, Cambodian
Languages : en
Pages : 69

Get Book

Book Description
A rare and brilliant story from Zadie Smith, taking us deep into the life of a young woman, Fatou, domestic servant to the Derawals and escapee from one set of hardships to another. Beginning and ending outside the Embassy of Cambodia, which happens to be located in Willesden, NW London, Zadie Smith's absorbing, moving and wryly observed story suggests how the apparently small things in an ordinary life always raise larger, more extraordinary questions. 'It's scale is superficially small, but its range is lightly immense; in the first couple of pages, the world from Ghana to London to Cambodia enters. It is a fiction of consequences both global and heartrenchingly intimate. This voice is global, plural and local, with a delicate grip on historic consequences...... Works on an awesomely global scale, and the relations of slavery and mastership are traced in both personal and international scale.' Philip Hensher, The Guardian 'Reading it is a bit like having a starter in a restaurant that is so good you wish you had ordered a big portion as a main course, only to realise, as you finish it, that it was exactly the right amount.' 'A perfect stocking-filler of a book that shows that short-form fiction can be as vibrant and as healthy as any densely realised full-length novel.' Louise Doughty, The Observer 'Smith serves up a smasher.' Leyla Sanai, The Independent On Sunday

Cambodia's Curse

Cambodia's Curse PDF Author: Joel Brinkley
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1610390016
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
A generation after the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia shows every sign of having overcome its history--the streets of Phnom Penh are paved; skyscrapers dot the skyline. But under this façade lies a country still haunted by its years of terror. Joel Brinkley won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in Cambodia on the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime that killed one quarter of the nation's population during its years in power. In 1992, the world came together to help pull the small nation out of the mire. Cambodia became a United Nations protectorate--the first and only time the UN tried something so ambitious. What did the new, democratically-elected government do with this unprecedented gift? In 2008 and 2009, Brinkley returned to Cambodia to find out. He discovered a population in the grip of a venal government. He learned that one-third to one-half of Cambodians who lived through the Khmer Rouge era have P.T.S.D.--and its afflictions are being passed to the next generation. His extensive close-up reporting in Cambodia's Curse illuminates the country, its people, and the deep historical roots of its modern-day behavior.

Model Citizens

Model Citizens PDF Author: Haresh Sharma
Publisher: Epigram Books
ISBN: 9810731884
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 51

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Book Description
A man stabs an MP at a Meet-the-People Session. But this is not their story. It is the story of the man’s girlfriend, an Indonesian maid who wants to get married and become a Singaporean citizen. It is the story of the MP’s wife, who tries to cope with her husband’s injury and the media spotlight. It is the story of the maid’s employer, who is also struggling with her own tragedy. These three women may mean nothing to each other, but they need one another to survive. The maid, the employer and the MP’s wife. Are they all model citizens? Written by veteran Singaporean playwright Haresh Sharma, Model Citizens won Best Director (Alvin Tan) and Best Actress (Siti Khalijah Zainal) at the 2011 The Straits Times Life!Theatre Awards.

Lucky Child

Lucky Child PDF Author: Loung Ung
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062013513
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
After enduring years of hunger, deprivation, and devastating loss at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, ten-year-old Loung Ung became the "lucky child," the sibling chosen to accompany her eldest brother to America while her one surviving sister and two brothers remained behind. In this poignant and elegiac memoir, Loung recalls her assimilation into an unfamiliar new culture while struggling to overcome dogged memories of violence and the deep scars of war. In alternating chapters, she gives voice to Chou, the beloved older sister whose life in war-torn Cambodia so easily could have been hers. Highlighting the harsh realities of chance and circumstance in times of war as well as in times of peace, Lucky Child is ultimately a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and to the salvaging strength of family bonds.

River of Time

River of Time PDF Author: Jon Swain
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1407072803
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Between 1970 and 1975 Jon Swain, the English journalist portrayed in David Puttnam's film, The Killing Fields, lived in the lands of the Mekong river. This is his account of those years, and the way in which the tumultuous events affected his perceptions of life and death as Europe never could. He also describes the beauty of the Mekong landscape - the villages along its banks, surrounded by mangoes, bananas and coconuts, and the exquisite women, the odours of opium, and the region's other face - that of violence and corruption.

Murder and Mayhem in Seventeenth-century Cambodia

Murder and Mayhem in Seventeenth-century Cambodia PDF Author: Alfons Van der Kraan
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Book Description
This book tells the story of the conflict from 1636 to 1645 between Cambodia and the Dutch East India Company (VOC), which has the dubious distinction of being history's first conflict between a mainland Southeast Asian state and a European power. It affords a glimpse into the largely unknown period in Cambodian history between the fall of Angkor in the mid-fifteenth century and the arrival of the French in the late-nineteenth century.

Postcolonial Justice

Postcolonial Justice PDF Author: Anke Bartels
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004335196
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
Postcolonial Justice addresses a crucial issue in current postcolonial theory: the question of how to reconcile an ethics of diversity and difference with the normative, if not universal thrust that appears to energize any notion of justice.

The Gate

The Gate PDF Author: Francois Bizot
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307428656
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
In 1971 a young French ethnologist named Francois Bizot was taken prisoner by forces of the Khmer Rouge who kept him chained in a jungle camp for months before releasing him. Four years later Bizot became the intermediary between the now victorious Khmer Rouge and the occupants of the besieged French embassy in Phnom Penh, eventually leading a desperate convoy of foreigners to safety across the Thai border. Out of those ordeals comes this transfixing book. At its center lies the relationship between Bizot and his principal captor, a man named Douch, who is today known as the most notorious of the Khmer Rouge’s torturers but who, for a while, was Bizot’s protector and friend. Written with the immediacy of a great novel, unsparing in its understanding of evil, The Gate manages to be at once wrenching and redemptive.

Sideshow

Sideshow PDF Author: William Shawcross
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1493083252
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 542

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Book Description
Although there are many books and films dealing with the Vietnam War, Sideshow tells the truth about America's secret and illegal war with Cambodia from 1969 to 1973. William Shawcross interviewed hundreds of people of all nationalities, including cabinet ministers, military men, and civil servants, and extensively researched U.S. Government documents. This full-scale investigation—with material new to this edition—exposes how Kissinger and Nixon treated Cambodia as a sideshow. Although the president and his assistant claimed that a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia was necessary to eliminate North Vietnamese soldiers who were attacking American troops across the border, Shawcross maintains that the bombings only spread the conflict, but led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the subsequent massacre of a third of Cambodia's population.

Exiting Indochina

Exiting Indochina PDF Author: Richard H. Solomon
Publisher: US Institute of Peace Press
ISBN: 9781929223015
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
For most Americans, the "exit" from Indochina occurred in 1973, with the withdrawal of the U.S. military from South Vietnam. In fact, the final exit did not occur until two decades later, after the collapse of the Republic of Vietnam in 1975, the Cambodian revolution, and a decade of Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia. Only in the early 1990s were the major powers able to negotiate a settlement of the Cambodia conflict and withdraw from the region. This book recounts the diplomacy that brought an end to great power involvement in Indochina, including the negotiations for a UN peace process in Cambodia and construction of a "road map" for normalizing U.S.-Vietnam relations. In so doing, this volume also highlights the changing character of diplomacy at the beginning of the 1990s, when, at least temporarily, an era of military confrontation among the major world powers gave way to political management of international conflicts.