Southeast Asia History

In three straight years he was a paratrooper, an army seaman, and a LRRP - and he lived to tell about it. As an FNG paratrooper in the 173d Airborne, John Leppelman made that unit's only combat jump in Vietnam. Then he spent months in fruitless search of the enemy, watching as his buddies died because of poor leadership and lousy weapons. Often it seemed the only way out of the carnage in the central highlands was in a body bag. But Leppelman did get out.

In this "immersive, densely reported, and altogether remarkable first book [with] the texture and color of a first-rate novel" (New York Times), journalist Doug Bock Clark tells the epic story of the world's last subsistence whalers and the threats posed to a tribe on the brink. Deeply empathetic and richly reported, The Last Whalers is a riveting, powerful chronicle of the collision between one of the planet's dwindling indigenous peoples and the irresistible enticements and upheavals of a rapidly transforming world.

Only three short years after the end of the Japanese occupation, war came again to Malaya. The Chinese-backed guerrillas called it the War of the Running Dogs—their contemptuous term for those in Malaya who remained loyal to the British. The British Government referred to this bloody and costly struggle as the 'Malayan Emergency'. Yet it was a war that lasted twelve years and cost thousands of lives. By the time it was over Malaya had obtained its independence—but on British, not on Chinese or Communist terms.

Delving into the last gasps of the First Indochina War, which saw the communist Viet Minh take control of North Vietnam, Éric Vuillard vividly illustrates the attitudes that both enabled French colonialist abuses and ultimately led to their defeat and withdrawal. From the Michelin rubber plantation, where horrific working conditions sparked an epidemic of suicides, to the battlefield, a sense of superiority over the "yellow men" pervaded European and American forces.

A powerful work of literary military history from the New York Times best-selling author of In Harm's Way and Horse Soldiers - the harrowing and redemptive account of an American army platoon fighting for survival during the Vietnam War.

If you want to discover the captivating history of Cambodia, then pay attention...Cambodia, or, as it was once known, Kampuchea, is a beautiful country, replete with an incredibly wondrous system of canals. But its history has been marked by the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot, which brought the nation to its knees. Although it has risen from the ashes of genocide, it is still facing a major crisis today. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn about the History of Cambodia.

Sharing borders with six countries and spanning a geography that extends from Pakistan to Myanmar, India is the world's largest democracy and second most populous country. It is also the site of the world's biggest crisis of statelessness, as it strips citizenship from hundreds of thousands of its people - especially those living in disputed border regions.

Today Vietnam is one of America’s strongest international partners, with a thriving economy and a population that welcomes American visitors. How that relationship was formed is a 20-year story of daring diplomacy and a careful thawing of tensions between the two countries after a lengthy war that cost nearly 60,000 American and more than two million Vietnamese lives.

The Philippine-American War of 1899-1902 was a dramatic, world-changing conflict that shaped the century to come and revealed the early stirrings of America’s drive for global power. The conflict and its aftershocks continue to influence the Philippines and the wider region to this day, leaving a legacy of governance, society, and economic organization.

Dissects the aftermath of the war in Southeast Asia, the refugee problem, the Vietnam/Cambodia conflict, and the Pol Pot regime.

While most historians of the Vietnam War focus on the origins of US involvement and the Americanization of the conflict, Lien-Hang T. Nguyen examines the international context in which North Vietnamese leaders pursued the war and American intervention ended. This riveting narrative takes the listener from the marshy Mekong Delta swamps to the bomb-saturated Red River Delta, from the corridors of power in Hanoi and Saigon to the Nixon White House, and from the peace negotiations in Paris to high-level meetings in Beijing and Moscow.

Hong Kong was an experiment in governance. Handed back to China in 1997 after 156 years of British rule, it was meant to be a carve-out between hostile systems: a bridge between communism and capitalism, authoritarianism and liberal democracy. “One country, two systems” kept its media free, its courts independent and its protests boisterous, designed also to convince Taiwan of a peaceful solution to Beijing’s desire for reunification. In Among the Braves, Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin tell the story of Hong Kong’s past.

After being captured in Singapore and transported to the infamous Burma railway, Colonel Owtram was appointed the British Camp Commandant at Chungkai, one of the largest POW camps. Many ex-prisoners testified to the mental and physical courage that he showed protecting POWs from the worst excesses of their captors. Of course his account does not admit to this, but what is clear is that in addition to the deprivation and hardship suffered by all POWs, the author bore heavy responsibility for those under his charge and the daily trauma of dealing with the unpredictable Japanese.

In March 1906, American soldiers on the island of Jolo in the southern Philippines surrounded and killed 1000 local men, women, and children, known as Moros, on top of an extinct volcano. The so-called ‘Battle of Bud Dajo’ was hailed as a triumph over an implacable band of dangerous savages, a “brilliant feat of arms” according to President Theodore Roosevelt. Some contemporaries, including W.E.B. Du Bois and Mark Twain, saw the massacre for what it was, but they were the exception and the U.S. military authorities successfully managed to bury the story.

The English Governess at the Siamese Court, written in 1870, vividly recounts the experiences of one Anna Harriette Leonowens as governess for the sixty-plus children of King Mongkut of Siam, and translator and scribe for the King himself. Bright, young, and energetic, Leonowens was well-suited to her role and her writings convey a heartfelt interest in the lives, legends, and languages of Siam's rich and poor.

There was no pattern to the murders, no common thread other than the fact that the victims were all vacationers, robbed of their possessions, and slain in seemingly random crimes. Authorities across three continents and a dozen nations had no idea they were all looking for the same man: Charles Sobhraj, aka "The Serpent". A handsome Frenchman of Vietnamese and Indian origin, Sobhraj targeted backpackers on the "hippie trail" between Europe and South Asia. A master of deception, he used his powerful intellect and considerable sex appeal to lure naive travelers into a life of crime.

Learn about how the dichotomous twins of idealism and pragmatism, of freedom and power, and of hope and fear are pitched against each other, wrestling for the future of Cambodia. This is Cambodia through the lens of human stories in what journalists and politicians have called 'gripping', 'a tour de force' and 'a must read'.

Jim Thompson landed in Thailand at the end of World War II, a former American society dilettante who became an Asian legend as a spy and silk magnate with access to Thai worlds outsiders never saw. As the Cold War reached Thailand, America had a choice: Should it, as Thompson believed, help other nations build democracies from their traditional cultures or, as his ex-OSS friend Willis Bird argued, remake the world through deception and self-serving alliances? This book explores a key Cold War epidsode.

We Band of Angelsis the story of women searching for adventure, caught up in the drama and danger of war. On the same day the Japanese Imperial Navy launched its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, it also struck American bases in the Far East, chief among them the Philippines. That raid led to the first major land battle for America in World War II and, in the end, to the largest defeat and surrender of American forces.

On February 15, 1942, the British surrendered to the Imperial Japanese Army and handed over Singapore and surrounding Malaya countries. The conflict began on December 8, 1941, when Japanese forces bombed Singapore and continued to make their way through the treacherous Malayan jungle. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill stated during the attack, “the worst disaster and the largest capitulation in British history”.