The author of this book on the prostitution “rescue industry” caught our eye here on a WoWasis blog post earlier this year, when we reported this comment in her own blog, quoted from a Thai women’s organization: We have now reached a point in history where there are more women in the Thai sex industry being […]
Read the rest of this entry »Archive for the 'Literature' Category
WoWasis book review: ‘Ho Chi Minh: A Life’ by William J. Duiker
Author William J. Duiker worked in Saigon’s U.S. embassy during the Vietnam war years, and has penned an exhaustive review of the life of Ho Chi Minh in Ho Chi Minh: A Life (2001, ISBN 978-0786887019). The text is 577 pages long, and what really emerges is essentially the story of a conciliator who played […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis Book review: Timothy Hallinan’s ‘The Fear Artist’
In his latest book, The Fear Artist (2012, ISBN 978-1-61695-112-2), veteran Bangkok Fiction writer Timothy Hallinan sure knows how to make a reader feel that he or she is in Bangkok: The soi itself is almost as featureless as the stucco wall: a thin seam of asphalt too narrow for two cars, framed by a […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: ‘Monuments of Civilization: Ancient Cambodia’
The large-format (13”x10”) Monuments of Civilization: Ancient Cambodia (1978, ISBN 0-448-02026-2) by Donatella Mazzeo and Chiara Silvi Antonini was actually first published in 1972, and remains a magnificent book, detailing the pre-Angkorean, Classic Angkorean, and Late Angkorean periods. The photographs are lavish, the text informative, and the diagrams readable, in this 192 page, 100 photograph […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: Nihal DeSilva’s ‘The Giniralla Conspiracy,’ Sri Lanka
The Giniralla Conspiracy (2005, ISBN 978-955-1266-02-8), was Sri Lankan novelist Nihal DeSilva’s third and final completed book hHe was killed by a landmine while in his mid-50s, making for a short, but stellar literary career). Like his two previous books, The Far-Spent Day, and the Gratiaen Prize-winning The Road from Elephant Pass, it is based […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: ‘The Snakehead’: of smuggling Chinese nationals into the U.S.
WoWasis has already reported on the AAMP (Asian Apartment Massage Parlor) scene in the western U.S. In that environment, based on our interviews, it would appear that most of the women involved in the trade view the United States as a quick way to make great money, and a way-stop on their way back home. Whether […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: Nihal DeSilva’s ‘The Far Spent Day,’ Sri Lanka
Nihal DeSilva was a formidable novelist, a master of plot and character development who was killed by a landmine while in his mid-50s, only three books into a literary career that promised to propel him into the firament of notable writers of political intrigue. The Far-Spent Day (2004, ISBN 978-955-8095-74-4), like his previous book, the […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: the life of a surgeon in Sri Lanka, by Dr. Philip Veerasingam
Dr. Philip G. Veerasingam worked in the Department of Health, Ceylon/Sri Lanka, from 1965 to 2000, and discusses his life as a surgeon in a memoir, The Cry of the Devil Bird: Incidents in the Life of a Surgeon (2010, ISBN 978-955-1723-13-2). It is essentially the story of a country doctor, working in at times […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: ‘Chinaman,’ a fictional Sri Lankan cricket tale by Shehan Karunatilaka
There’s some damn good fiction coming out of Sri Lanka these days, but it’s not all that easy to find. Bookstores exist in Colombo, but they’re not exactly on tourist routes. We at WoWasis found really great stores — including the Odel shop — in the shopping gallery at the airport, near the exit gates […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: ‘Blue Stories for Adults’ erotica from Sri Lanka
In her introduction to Blue Stories for Adults (2010, ISBN 978-955-8897-20-1) editor (and contributing author) Ameena Hussein writes that one of the aims of the book is to challenge stereotypes of Sri Lankan sexuality. She also mentions that it does not “claim to be the representative literature of Sri Lankan erotica… but it is a […]
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