Found 393 South East Asia Products.
It may seem a stretch to connect a volcanic eruption with civil and religious unrest in Indonesia today, but Simon Winchester makes a compelling case. Krakatoa tells the frightening tale of the biggest volcanic eruption in history using a blend of gentle geology and narrative history. Krakatoa erupted at a time when technologies like the telegraph were becoming commonplace and Asian trade routes were being expanded by northern European companies. This bustling colonial backdrop provides an effective canvas for the suspense leading up to August 27th, 1883, when the nearby island of Krakatoa would violently vaporize. Winchester describes the eruption through the eyes of its survivors, and readers will be as horrified and mesmerized as eyewitnesses were as the death toll reached nearly 40,000 (almost all of whom died from tsunamis generated by the unimaginably strong shock waves of the eruption). Ships were thrown miles inshore, endless rains of hot ash engulfed those towns not drowned by 100 foot waves, and vast rafts of pumice clogged the hot sea. The explosion was heard thousands of miles away, and the eruption's shock wave traveled around the world seven times. But the book's biggest surprise is not the riveting catalog of the volcano's effects; rather, it is Winchester's contention that the Dutch abandonment of their Indonesian colonies after the disaster left local survivors to seek comfort in radical Islam, setting the stage for a volatile future for the region. --Therese Littleton
Price : $9.45
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From mushrooms to ferns, to trees and shrubs, nature offers a slew of healthy and tasty menu alternatives. We no longer have to limit ourselves to the 50 to 60 fruits and vegetables commonly grown in North America but can now learn and begin to enjoy more than 4,000 wild and delicious foods growing in our own back yards!Noted ethnobotanist Dr. Francois Couplan has been teaching the uses of various fruits, nuts, and grains world wide since 1975 and has published more than 13 books about plants in both French and German. He has worked with world-renowned chefs including Jean-Georges Vongerichten in New York, to bring wild plants to gourmet menus and has been cooking with hundreds of different plants for the past thirty years. This title is not only a guide to intriguing and palatable edible plants based on the author's personal experiences but a unique pathway to appreciating nature.
Price : $24.95
$24.95
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Now substantially revised and updated, the Twelfth Edition of de Blij and Muller's Geography: Realms, Regions, and Concepts continues to deliver the authors' authoritative content, outstanding cartography, currency, and comprehensive coverage, in a technology-rich package. The text reflects major developments in the world as well as in the discipline, ranging from the collapse of Russia's Post-Soviet transformation to the impact of globalization and from the rise of Asia's Pacific Rim to the war in Iraq.
Price : $50.00
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Price : $22.24
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A significant contribution to political ecology, Conservation Is Our Government Now is an ethnographic examination of the history and social effects of conservation and development efforts in Papua New Guinea. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted over a period of seven years, Paige West focuses on the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area, the site of a biodiversity conservation project implemented between 1994 and 1999. She describes the interactions between those who ran the programâmostly ngo workersâand the Gimi people who live in the forests surrounding Crater Mountain. West shows that throughout the project there was a profound disconnect between the goals of the two groups. The ngo workers thought that they would encourage conservation and cultivate development by teaching Gimi to value biodiversity as an economic resource. The villagers expected that in exchange for the land, labor, food, and friendship they offered the conservation workers, they would receive benefits, such as medicine and technology. In the end, the divergent nature of each group’s expectations led to disappointment for both.West reveals how every aspect of the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Areaâincluding ideas of space, place, environment, and societyâwas socially produced, created by changing configurations of ideas, actions, and material relations not only in Papua New Guinea but also in other locations around the world. Complicating many of the assumptions about nature, culture, and development underlying contemporary conservation efforts, Conservation Is Our Government Now demonstrates the unique capacity of ethnography to illuminate the relationship between the global and the local, between transnational processes and individual lives.
Price : $20.63
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"The Mekong scours some of the saddest history of recent years," writes Edward A. Gargan in this richly described and melancholic tale of his journey through Tibet, China, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Thirty years after landing in jail for refusing to register for the draft, the war-protester-turned-foreign-correspondent decided to see for himself how these countries have brought themselves back from the brink, and how their myriad cultures are struggling to preserve themselves. Beginning at the source of the Mekong River, near a camp of nomads high on the Tibetan plateau, he followed the 3,000 mile-long waterway through the heart of some of Asia's most complex and wounded societies. While the first half of Gargan's story, which focuses on China's demolition of Tibetan and other minority cultures, is interesting, it becomes gripping in the claustrophobic paranoia of Laos and post-Pol Pot Cambodia. Ultimately it becomes clear that while America lost the war in Vietnam, it has never left the region--lingering in the scars of war and inversely the creeping acceptance, if not embrace, of all things American. --Lesley Reed
Price : $11.68
$11.68
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The most striking feature of British colonialism in the twentieth century was the confidence it expressed in the use of science and expertise, especially when joined with the new bureaucratic capacities of the state, to develop natural and human resources of the empire. Triumph of the Expert is a history of British colonial doctrine and its contribution to the emergence of rural development and environmental policies in the late colonial and postcolonial period. Joseph Morgan Hodge examines the way that development as a framework of ideas and institutional practices emerged out of the strategic engagement between science and the state at the climax of the British Empire. Hodge looks intently at the structural constraints, bureaucratic fissures, and contradictory imperatives that beset and ultimately overwhelmed the late colonial development mission in sub-Saharan Africa, south and southeast Asia, and the Caribbean. Triumph of the Expert seeks to understand the quandaries that led up to the important transformation in British imperial thought and practice and the intellectual and administrative legacies it left behind.
Price : $26.95
$26.95
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Price : $152.82
$152.82
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A country uncommonly rich in plants, animals, and natural habitats, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam shelters a significant portion of the worldâs biological diversity, including rare and unique organisms and an unusual mixture of tropical and temperate species. This book is the first comprehensive account of Vietnamâs natural history in English. Illustrated with maps, photographs, and thirty-five original watercolor illustrations, the book offers a complete tour of the countryâs plants and animals along with a full discussion of the factors shaping their evolution and distribution.Separate chapters focus on northern, central, and southern Vietnam, regions that encompass tropics, subtropics, mountains, lowlands, wetland and river regions, delta and coastal areas, and offshore islands. The authors provide detailed descriptions of key natural areas to visit, where a traveler might explore limestone caves or glimpse some of the countryâs twenty-seven monkey and ape species and more than 850 bird species. The book also explores the long history of humans in the country, including the impact of the Vietnam-American War on plants and animals, and describes current efforts to conserve Vietnamâs complex, fragile, and widely threatened biodiversity.
Price : $22.00
$22.00
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A deeply reported account of life inside Burma in the months following the disastrous Cyclone Nargis and an analysis of the brutal totalitarian regime that clings to power in the devastated nation. On May 2, 2008, an enormous tropical cyclone made landfall in Burma, wreaking untold havoc and leaving an official toll of 138,300 dead and missing. In the days that followed, the sheer scale of the disaster became apparent as information began to seep out from the hard-hit delta area. But the Burmese regime, in an unfathomable decision of near-genocidal proportions, provided little relief to its suffering population and blocked international aid from entering the country. Hundreds of thousands of Burmese citizens lacked food, drinking water, and basic shelter, but the xenophobic generals who rule the country refused emergency help. Emma Larkin, who has been traveling to and secretly reporting on Burma for years, managed to arrange for a tourist visa in those frenzied days and arrived hoping to help. It was impossible for anyone to gauge just how much devastation the cyclone had left in its wake; by all accounts, including the regime's, it was a catastrophe of epic proportions. In Everything Is Broken, Emma Larkin chronicles the chaotic days and months that followed the storm, revealing the secretive politics of Burma's military dictatorship and the bizarre combination of vicious military force, religion, and mysticism that defined its unthinkable response to this horrific event. The Burmese regime hid the full extent of the storm's devastation from the rest of the world, but the terrible consequences for Burma and its citizens continue to play out months after the headlines have faded from newspapers around the world. In Everything Is Broken, Larkin-whose deep knowledge of the Burmese people has afforded her unprecedented access and a rare understanding of life under Burmese oppression-provides a singular portrait of the regime responsible for compounding the tragedy and examines the historical, religious, and superstitious setting that created Burma's tenacious and brutal dictatorship. Writing under an assumed name, Larkin delivers the heretofore untold story of a disaster that stunned the world, unveiling as she does so the motivations of the impenetrable generals who govern this troubled nation.
Price : $10.38
$10.38
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