Lands of Charm and Cruelty: Travels in Southeast Asia, 1st Vintage Departures
With detail, expertise and a moral voice, freelance writer Sesser portrays five repressed lands. His narratives--reprinted from the New Yorker --begin with the contradictions of Singapore, prosperous and tidy, whose competent, incorruptible leaders rule by fear. In desperately poor Laos, where the United States dropped more bombs than on Nazi Germany, villagers fashion daily essentials from remnant munitions and the wreckage of downed planes. A chilling report on Cambodia warns of the political reemergence of the murderous Khmer Rouge. A portrait of Burma limns how that republic's form of Buddhism tolerates tyranny and describes the nascent protest movement led by Aung San Suu Kyi. Sesser does not condemn all logging in Borneo, but finds the telling detail: in Japan, the logs become plywood, as "the gold of the Sarawak rain forest is minted into pennies."Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.