A History of Cambodia

Rating:
Summary: This is what a history book ought to be
Review: Chandler presents a rather complete picture of the long history of Cambodia in about 250 pages. He's concise--what a blessing from a historian. He highlights the most important AND the most interesting details about each period in Cambodian history, and avoids the common problem of banality that many history books have. It's truly a good read, and an easy one, too. It's written in a very clear style--another of its strong points.

In sum, I am supplementing this book with one that deals exclusively with Cambodian history in the last 30 years, but for the "big picture," "A History of Cambodia" is The One. I couldn't be more impressed.

Rating:
Summary: third edition will be available March 2000
Review: second edition (paper) in print; a third updated edition will be available March 2000

Rating:
Summary: A Respectable Showing--Too Bad It's The Only One
Review: The coverage in this book is genuinely refreshing: from dim origins of the various ethnic and linguistic groups of Indochina; through the fascinating but frustratingly scant data on pre-Angkorean times; to the glory of Angkor itself; and then into the welcome light of more ample documentation, be it Chinese, European, Siamese or Vietnamese; and finally, of course, colonization, modern war, and the staggering horror of the Khmer Rouge. I believe that history--all history--is the mother of insight, and Chandler's work serves to bolster this opinion. Even the pre-Angkorean chapters--which, as I noted, are cursed by a paucity of evidence--fired my mind: I am now fascinated by the "indianization" of Southeast Asia that occurred in the first millenium AD. It struck me that it was one of the few times where a civilization spread its culture in a big way without either much violence or emigration. [Are there parallels with the contemporary global spread of American culture? True, American ascendance has not been without a torrent of violence--as amply recounted in this book--but I would submit that force has, if anything, hindered rather than advanced the adoption of American cultural norms.] This book is also a welcome antidote to the myriad histories of Southeast Asia that treat all the events before European colonization as the merest of preambles. We learn, for instance, that well before Cambodia became a disposable pawn in bloody post-war neo-imperialist games, it was long an important prize in a previous bipolar arena of gruesome geopolitical struggle--that between Vietnam and Siam in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thus the tragedy of modern Cambodia does not lie in Western, patronizing visions of the Cambodians as innocent children, but rather in the story of a wordly civilization that had endured and survived so many depradations from outsiders, only to all but self-destruct in our own time.

Rating:
Summary: Good.
Review: This is a very succint but adequate history of Cambodia, which started some 2,000 years ago with the Funan empire (1st to 6th centuries AD) and reached its peak with the Khmer empire (9th to 13th centuries AD) and its famous Angkor monuments. From then on, it was a steep downward slide into oblivion.

One just has to wonder how such a brilliant civilization could have disappeared even from the minds and memory of its own people. A Frenchman, Henri Mouhot, rediscovered the Angkor complex in 1860.

Rating:
Summary: Another masterpiece from David Chandler.
Review: Those who are fascinated with Cambodia, the Khmer language and the Cambodian people treasure the work of David Chandler. Clear and logical presentation are to be taken for granted. The author has for years set the standard toward which the next generation of Asia scholars strive. Even more rare than his impressive intellect is David Chandler's collegial approach to his subjects and his fellow researchers.