Sex, Lies & Alibis Tippawan is suspicious when her ex-fiancé starts being nice. She’s about to find out why. Joe Copeland races to save his son from drugs, and discovers more than he ever wanted to know. Young Troy learns an painful truth about his father after his mother dies. Kamra’s life has not been an easy one. Hear a Thai lady’s story in her own poignant words. See Hanoi through the eyes of a fiction writer. Tad’s brother is dead in Thailand. He goes there to find out why. He should have stayed home…. And Other Musings
Jarapans dreams died the day she was raped. It wasnt her fault, yet everyone treats her with disdain. She flees to the tourist city of Pattaya to start a new life. That decision unleashes the grinding wheels of fate. Mike Johnson has lived in Pattaya long enough to become a cynical man. Nothing has been the same since he lost Tippawan (“Math”) Bongkarn, the woman who holds his heart even in her death. When he meets Jarapan, long-buried passions explode into love. Then he gets sick, really sick. It ignites a firestorm that tests their new love beyond endurance. “One High Season” is the emotional conclusion of the powerful Thailand Trilogy that spans continents and cultures in its search for love and happiness. Read all three books: “Even Thai Girls Cry“, “The Farang Affair“, and this, “One High Season“.
Nearly a year has passed since Tippawan Bongkots life ended in Thailands insane traffic. Her death made only the smallest ripple in the world, but it ignited events still felt from Pittsburgh to Bangkok.Maths sister, Nuang, cannot forget Mike Johnson, the farang who loved her sister, or the night of incredible passion they shared. When they meet again, shameful truths are revealed, and powerful emotions explode. Join Mike and Nuang as they discover the true meanings of love, hate, and forgiveness.A Farang Affair is a must for anyone who has read Even Thai Girls Cry and for anyone destined to read One High Season: the final book of this unforgettable Thailand Trilogy.
Thailand has become well known throughout the world for wonderful cuisine, great package holidays, sumptuous temples and textiles. Noticeably absent from glossy tourist brochures but equally well known throughout the Western world is Thailand's seedier side - the world of child exploitation, rampant prostitution and AIDS. Thailand maintains its appeal by slipping the ugly and painful out of sight and by promoting women as exotic visual icons through beauty contests, state rituals and the sex trade. This book explores the construction of gender in Thailand and in particular the role Bangkok plays in establishing gender relations for the whole of the country. It examines the historical and cultural processes underlying Thai public culture, including historical theme parks. The author demonstrates how the materiality of the Thai world shapes gender relations and how Buddhism discourages essentialisms, including fixed binary gender identities. Throughout the book, appearances are shown to be critically important, and the essentialism of gender is maintained through display, public presentations, and everyday material practices. Anyone wishing to understand the complexity of Thailand will find this book provides a highly readable and insightful analysis.
A PASSIONATE, AFFECTIONATE RECORD OF ADVENTURES AND MISADVENTURES IN THE WORLD'S HOTTEST METROPOLIS Tourists come to Bangkok for many reasons—a sex change operation, a night with two prostitutes dressed as nuns, a stay in a luxury hotel. Lawrence Osborne comes for the cheap dentistry. Broke (but no longer in pain), he finds that he can live in Bangkok on a few dollars a day. And so the restless exile stays. Osborne's is a visceral experience of Bangkok, whether he's wandering the canals that fill the old city; dining at the No Hands Restaurant, where his waitress feeds him like a baby; or launching his own notably unsuccessful career as a gigolo. A guide without inhibitions, Osborne takes us to a feverish place where a strange blend of ancient Buddhist practice and new sexual mores has created a version of modernity only superficially indebted to the West. Bangkok Days is a love letter to the city that revived Osborne's faith in adventure and the world.
Tippawan Bongkot is a young Thai woman on the run. Life as she knew it, ended the night she caught her fianc with his lover. Her world collapsed the day she lost her job. Desperate to find work, Tippawan escapes to the resort city of Pattaya hoping that things will change and her bad luck will end. When she meets the farang, a foreigner named Mike, her world does change, but in ways she could have never imagined. Her search for happiness is a haunting adventure not easily forgotten. Walk with Tippawan as she journeys through one year of her incredible life. Discover the love, hate, and intrigue beneath the tranquil surface of everyday Thailand.
The massacre on October 6, 1976, in Bangkok was brutal and violent, its savagery unprecedented in modern Thai history. Four decades later there has been no investigation into the atrocity; information remains limited, the truth unknown. There has been no collective coming to terms with what happened or who is responsible. Thai society still refuses to confront this dark page in its history. Moments of Silence focuses on the silence that surrounds the October 6 massacre. Silence, the book argues, is not forgetting. Rather it signals an inability to forget or remember—or to articulate a socially meaningful memory. It is the “unforgetting,” the liminal domain between remembering and forgetting. Historian Thongchai Winichakul, a participant in the events of that day, gives the silence both a voice and a history by highlighting the factors that contributed to the unforgetting amidst changing memories of the massacre over the decades that followed. They include shifting political conditions and context, the influence of Buddhism, the royal-nationalist narrative of history, the role played by the monarchy as moral authority and arbiter of justice, and a widespread perception that the truth might have devastating ramifications for Thai society. The unforgetting impacted both victims and perpetrators in different ways. It produced a collective false memory of an incident that never took place, but it also produced silence that is filled with hope and counter-history. Moments of Silence tells the story of a tragedy in Thailand—its victims and survivors—and how Thai people coped when closure was unavailable in the wake of atrocity. But it also illuminates the unforgetting as a phenomenon common to other times and places where authoritarian governments flourish, where atrocities go unexamined, and where censorship (imposed or self-directed) limits public discourse. The tensions inherent in the author’s dual role offer a riveting story, as well as a rare and intriguing perspective. Most of all, this provocative book makes clear the need to provide a place for past wrongs in the public memory.
Asian American Christianity is one of the fastest-growing forms of American Christianity, and it has already proven to be one of the richest and most innovative movements in North American religion. With a deep understanding of their roots in classic Christianity as well as the diversity of Asian culture, these theological voices have contributed some of the freshest and most provocative work of recent decades. This volume brings together women who are searching for authentic Christian dialogue in a world of hybridity and changing context, and it represents one of the most significant areas of growth and vitality in contemporary Christianity.
"This is Thailand" is the riveting real-life account of Marek Lenarcik's blind leap from the safe, comfortable and utterly bullshit, corporate world of Dublin to the charming, exotic beaches of Thailand. With rose-tinted glasses firmly in place, Marek fully expects to find a land of exotic fruits, beautiful women and an easy-going tropical lifestyle. Which he does. At first. Traveling from Phuket to Bangkok and throughout Thailand's exotic locales, Marek's desire to experience all the forbidden fruits Thailand has to offer leads him to Piam, a gorgeous, kind, independent Thai girl who, he is convinced, might well be the one. But as he immerses himself deeper into this strange country, replete with often inexplicable thought-patterns, worldviews and customs, Marek begins to discover a much darker, more complex side to the Land of Smiles and its inhabitants. Soon, Piam begins to reveal her true colours. It soon dawns on him that, despite his best intentions (most of the time), he has been ensnared -- as have many men before him -- by the dreaded Honey Trap. The stormy relationship that ensues provides a fascinating backdrop to the insights into Thailand's unique culture that stem from Marek's efforts to come to terms with the reality of the country and the people who call it home.
This highly acclaimed book, the standard history of Thailand for almost twenty years, has now been completely revised by the author. David K. Wyatt has also added new sections examining the social and economic changes that have transformed the country in the past two decades. Praise for the previous edition: "Wyatt knows his subject well enough and has enough enthusiasm for it to make his book . . . entertaining as well as eminently educational."--David McElveen, Asiaweek "A very readable account. . . .We come away from reading it with a clearer understanding of where Thailand stands in relation to its neighbors, who the Thai people are, how the Thai government evolved into its present form."--James Stent, Asian Wall Street Journal "Concise, thorough, and readable."--John Gabree, New York Newsday
