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Another Bangkok
Another Bangkok
Nov 15, 2024 4:01 AM

Author:Alex Kerr

Another Bangkok

From the author of Another Kyoto and Lost Japan, a rich, personal exploration of the culture and history of Bangkok, and an essential guide for anyone visiting the city

Alex Kerr has spent over thirty years of his life living in Bangkok. As with his bestselling books on Japan, this evocative personal meditation explores the city's secret corners. Here is the huge, traffic-choked metropolis of concrete high-rises, slums and sky trains; but also a place of peace and grace. Looking afresh at everything from ceramics to Thai dance, flower patterns to old houses, Kerr reveals one of Asia's most kaleidoscopically complex cities. Another Bangkok will delight both those who think they know the city well and those visiting for the first time.

Reviews

Praise for Another Kyoto

—— (2018)

Kerr's way of questioning and puzzling through is hugely enjoyable in its own right, and pleasingly infectious.

—— Christopher Harding , Spectator

Captivating, informal ... Kerr is the perfect guide.

—— PD Smith , Guardian

Rich ... Kerr's combination of instinct and erudition serve him well ... there is something fresh and chirpy about the text, even when it deals with the most esoteric or arcane of subjects.

—— Stephen Mansfield , Japan Times

In this gorgeous debut, Kacenberg shares her harrowing and courageous story of surviving the Holocaust. This moving account is a welcome addition to the canon of WWII memoirs

—— Publisher’s Weekly

It's an account of astounding courage and resourcefulness . . . The real miracle here is the vitality of Kacenberg's faith and determination

—— Mail on Sunday

To read Mala's Cat is to enter a dreamscape of horrors seen through innocent eyes

—— Jewish Chronoicle

A much-needed book that stakes a solid place in a battlefield of ideas over America's past and present

—— Kirkus Reviews (starred)

Restores people erased from the national narrative, offering a motivating, if sobering, origin story we need to understand if we are ever going to truly achieve 'liberty and justice for all'

—— Women’s Review of Books

The ambitious project that got Americans rethinking our racial history... expanded into a book incorporating essays from pretty much everyone you want to hear from about the country's great topic and great shame

—— Los Angeles Times

The groundbreaking project from The New York Times, which created a new origin story for America based on the very beginnings of American slavery, is expanded into a very large, very powerful full-length book

—— Entertainment Weekly

Pleasingly symmetrical... [a] mosaic of a book, which achieves the impossible on so many levels -- moving from argument to fiction to argument, from theme to theme, and backward and forward in time, so smoothly

—— Slate

From Brexit Britain and Donald Trump's America to the cynical politics of Poland and Hungary, she feels beset by a new chauvinist right that has no regard for rules, truth or institutions. Ms Applebaum evokes an acute sense of betrayal as people she trusted turn against her, quicker than she thought possible. Her personal story is a parable of what can happen to alliances in the absence of a common adversary, and when the hardships such enemies inflicted fade from memory.

—— Economist

This is an illuminating political memoir about the break-up of the political tribe that won the Cold War.

—— David Goodhart , Literary Review

Equal parts memoir, reportage, and history, this sobering account of the roots and forms of today's authoritarianism, by one of its most accomplished observers, is meant as a warning to everyone. ... critically important for its muscular, oppositionist attack on the new right from within conservative ranks-and for the well-documented warning it embodies. The author's views are especially welcome because she is a deliberate thinker and astute observer rather than just the latest pundit or politico. In the spirit of Julien Benda, Hannah Arendt, and Theodor Adorno, Applebaum seeks to understand what makes the new right "more Bolshevik than Burkean."... A knowledgeable, rational, necessarily dark take on dark realities.

—— Kirkus Reviews

In this powerful and elegant book on James Baldwin, Eddie Glaude weaves together a biography, a meditation, a literary analysis, and a moral essay on America. Like Baldwin's own essays and books, it is at times both loving and angry, challenging and uplifting, and always beautiful. Both Baldwin and this book speak directly to today

—— Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs and Leonardo Da Vinci

A powerful study of how to bear witness in a moment when America is being called to do the same

—— TIME 100 Must-Read Books of 2020

Glaude's book is neither straight biography nor straight history, but rather historiography, reaching back and forth in time to show what Baldwin - whose centenary will be celebrated in 2024 - has to say to us and to teach us through his many writings at a time when "the idea of America is in deep trouble"

—— Liz Thomson , Arts Desk

A powerful, genre-defying work

—— David Terrien , ArtReview

Fascinating . . . An urgent and honest overview of Baldwin's work

—— Chartist

Many complicated human relations are on display in these irresistible diaries . . . The editor deserves the greatest praise. He has rightly included everything that brings Channon's shimmering brittle world to life . . . He has a gift for the sharp, striking phrase which bring events to life. If diaries are to achieve immortality, the diarist must be a first-class writer. Channon passes that with flying colours.

—— Lord Lexden , House Magazine

Better than any history or histories of these two decades . . . like a fusion of Debrett's and the Almanach de Gotha . . . Scrupulously scholarly . . . Simon Heffer has done a great service by revealing in this extraordinary new edition of the Channon diaries the decadence and complacency of the English political and upper classes.

—— Denis Macshane , The Tablet

The abundant footnotes . . . swarm with everything you might want to know about the British aristocracy between the wars . . . It's like reading Bertie Wooster set loose among the pages of Burke's Peerage, with lots of sucking-up where the jokes ought to be . . . His pen portraits of friends and rivals alike are etched in acid.

—— Anthony Quinn , Observer

The fascinating, unexpurgated interwar diaries of the Tory MP and social alpinist Henry "Chips" Channon, who met everyone who was anyone from Hitler to kings, the Pope and the Mitfords. Bonking, snobbery and bitchy remarks abound in this big beast of a book.

—— Times

I did enjoy the Chips Channon diaries, the new first volume. My most pleasurable reading experiences are diaries and letters. History unfiltered, not refracted through a historian's imagination. The Chips Channon diaries bring alive a section of society in the 20s and 30s with great vividness.

—— Robert Harris

Chips Channon wrote witheringly about everyone-except Hitler. But his diaries still make for strangely addictive reading . . . [Simon Heffer] has done a superb job.

—— Chris Mullin , Prospect Magazine

These unabridged, risqué, waspish, snobbish, social-climbing diaries have been worth the wait . . . All credit to Simon Heffer for his masterly editing and annotation.

—— The Field

The diaries are indeed indispensable for anyone seriously interested in the political and social history of interwar Britain.

—— History Today

Brilliantly and painstakingly edited by Simon Heffer. The enlarged Channon diaries have rightly attracted a great deal of attention . . . they are more detailed and more frank, and maybe more honest, about the opinions and sexual escapades of some of the leading figures in British politics and high society in the years between the world wars.

—— UnHerd

It sounds perverse to say that Channon's snobberies and prejudices make the diaries, but the unabashed exposure of these failings gives you an oddly impressive picture of a person in the setting of his time - the picture, I mean, is absorbing, whatever the subject's shortcomings. And though this colossal self-portrait describes much that's misguided, vain, and idiotic, it prompts you too to imagine those perishable qualities that history and biography so often fail to capture: the charm, generosity, personal magnetism, and brilliance of conversation that must have explained and sustained Chips's progress, the "success after success" that the diaries record and celebrate.

—— Alan Hollinghurst , New York Review of Books

One of the most talked about books of this year . . . compelling and significant.

—— Caroline Knox , The Scotsman

Channon's jaw-dropping account, lovingly curated by the historian and former Mail writer Simon Heffer, is compelling.

—— Daily Mail, Best Books for Summer

Delicious, dangerous and utterly compulsive.

—— The Week

Dripping with bons mots, anecdote and scandal, [these] are addictive, even if they elicit repulsion as well as delight.

—— Daily Telegraph, Best Summer Books

A momentous publishing event. Candid, unabashed, vivid and manifold. They will be prized for their powerful evocation of social milieux . . . Heffer's footnotes are always informative, just and accurate, often amusing, and can seldom be faulted.

—— Richard Davenport-Hines , TLS

An unadulterated masterpiece . . . A larder of quotable treats.

—— Sasha Swire , Tatler

Scintillating wit, memorable descriptions and compelling gossip. Heffer has done a magnificent job. Riveting.

—— Leo McKinstry , Daily Express

Whatever you think of him Channon ranks among the great diarists. He is at turns brilliant, witty, trivial and spiteful, with observations about some figures whose names have stood the test of time. Simon Heffer has done an excellent job as editor and his copious footnotes are often as entertaining as the diaries.

—— The Quarterly Review

An inspired diarist. After devouring this volume readers will be salivating for the next.

—— Andrew Roberts , The Critic
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